Leading names within the telecoms industry met last week in Latin America to discuss the future of the Cloud, and its effects for the continent.

Representatives from Cablevision - Federico Juarez Valdez, CIO, Telefonica Media Networks SA - Pedro Luis Planas, CTO LA, Grupo GTD - Cristian Eyzaguirre, CIO, Telefonica Media Networks Latin America - Javier Izquierdo, COO and COFETEL (Federal Telecommunications Commission) - Rodrigo Gutierrez Sandez, CIO - General Coordinator of Organisation and IT among others met in Mexico to discuss the advantages of moving to the cloud and how best to implement change at the NGT LA summit, an event hosted by GDS International.

The Information & Communications Technology (ICT) market will have a strong transformation over the next 10 years. Fixed and mobile network improvements, new infrastructure and application delivery models, along with more intelligent devices will change the way that consumers and businesses use technology, and ultimately the way they do business. It is still extremely important for service providers to set a roadmap for users to follow in order for them to be well prepared and to be successful in the current market transformation.

North America has already looked to the cloud to clean their data, reducing costs and implementing flexibility, but companies in Latin America are seemingly lagging behind; now these companies are seeing for themselves the opportunities for the taking.

Moving to the Cloud is a paradigm change, and much of the Telco and MSP market is fully aware of this. The issue is how to mature the approach to migrate from physical assets to virtualization, which stalls after a certain point, and then to an elastic infrastructure that can scale up and down on demand.

"To effectively implement these solutions, it is necessary to understand the real-time network and applications performance, risk, and quality of business service that impact user satisfaction and productivity. This understanding must bridge across all physical, virtual, and cloud environments, from the mainframe to distributed platforms." Kenneth Arredondo - SVP and GM Latin America, CA

The NGT LA Committee believe that by maximizing telecommunication companies' Cloud Computing services, capabilities and flexibility will be increased, time-to-market can be vastly reduced, and operational risks and costs can more easily be controlled. The committee hope that by implementing this they will see greater opportunities for offering new services and improving profit margins.

At this stage cloud computing is still relatively new. IT companies, for the most part, must implement their cloud solutions alone, but with meetings such as the NGT LA summit more and more cloud aggregators and integrators will begin to emerge.

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