Cloud-based services present an opportunity for the ICT industry to create new roles and increase revenues, experts from Ericsson told a conference in Amman. 

Top telecom and ICT companies are taking part in the Arab Advisors Group 9th Convergence Summit, which opened today in Amman.

A number of Ericsson’s top executives took part in the summit including Anders Lindblad, head of region Middle East and North-East Africa, who moderated the ‘State of the industry’ panel discussion.

During the discussion, executives from a number of telecom operators shared their insights on the industry and what is to come in the future.

“A key emerging theme we are seeing throughout the summit this year is an increased focus on the cloud,” said. “There is a great opportunity represented by cloud-based services for telecom providers because they increase the value of carrier networks in multiple ways and create new roles and revenues while also accelerating the journey towards the Networked Society.”

Ericsson’s partnership with Akamai continues to improve the technical performance of the cloud, he said.

Furthermore, Ericsson has recently engaged with the regulatory community around the region in order to help develop policies to enable a healthy cloud ecosystem, particularly in areas such as security, privacy reliability, performance and jurisdiction to name a few.

Lindblad explained that the cloud will greatly increase network traffic and utilization and thus transport revenues. “By delivering cloud-based services, telecom carriers have an opportunity to extract multiple revenue streams from the same function; charging end users for a given level of service quality and charging cloud-based providers for service quality as well,” he added.

In keeping with the ‘cloud’ theme, Tarek Saadi, president, North Middle East, Ericsson took part in a panel discussion entitled: ‘Convergence strategies panel: Cloud-based future’, while Ericsson’s head of marketing, government and industry relations for the Middle East, Jeremy Foster hosted a session entitled ‘Today’s Cloud: Same same or different?’

The two-day event, organised by The Arab Advisors Group and sponsored by Ericsson, is being held under the patronage of Princess Sumaya bint El Hassan, president of El Hassan Science City and the Royal Scientific Society.  - TradeArabia News Service