Delivering cloud services is emerging as the most important revenue opportunity of the decade for service providers.  On the 25th anniversary of John Gage's prophetic statement that ‘The Network is the Computer', traditional carriers are well positioned to make the leap from network services delivery to networked services delivery.  For most of them, it's no longer a question of ifbut rather how they make that transition to delivering 'the cloud'.    

With many different clouds serving many different needs, implementing a cloud services delivery infrastructure around a few offerings today raises the risk of managing services stovepipes tomorrow.  And given that not all services they may want to sell will reside in their own data centers, service providers must also contend with how they can deliver and manage external services as well as internal cloud services in a manner that still provides a seamless user and life-cycle management experience for their customers. 

Naturally, service providers are asking the question of how to dothis in a manner that optimizes time-to-market, maximizes their revenuepotential and competitive differentiation, integrates externally and internally delivered cloud services into a unified offering for their customers, and provides a future-proof means to expand and grow as the networked services market evolves.