Chinese billing vendor Asiainfo announced the launch of a new public cloud initiative in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), designed to support “mission critical services” for operators.

The service – Veris Cloud Core – is a complete cloud based version of its existing Veris BSS software suite, with the company claiming it will deploy the public cloud “for mission critical tier one telco core business systems”, for the first time.

The platform is not exclusive to Amazon, and can work on other public cloud environments, with the capability to be deployed within “just a few months,” said the company in a statement.

Notably, Asiainfo is launching its new cloud model without a customer signed up yet, but it is confident of rectifying that later this year.

Speaking at a pre-briefing held in London this week, Asiainfo’s VP for product marketing, Andy Tiller (pictured), talked up the solution, stating that its rapid time to market, and the removal of a significant amount of cost associated with traditional BSS solutions, could be some of the major selling points to operators. As part of the business case, the company said deploying the service in the cloud could cut implementation costs by 80 per cent, while time to market reduces by 36 per cent.

“Increasingly in the future, our industry will move towards more configurable off the shelf products deployed in the cloud, particularly in the public cloud space because there are considerable cost benefits,” said Tiller.

“There really isn’t a cost reason why operators would want to own a data centre in the future or all the costs associated with it, such as hardware, disaster recovery sites, and then new hardware that needs to upgraded.”

Tier two adopters 
Tiller expects tier two players in Europe to be among the first adopters, suggesting the bigger operator groups are not yet ready to take such a big leap of faith.

He noted that some of the reluctance in the industry to deploy a telco BSS in the public cloud also centres on data security and privacy concerns, but said the Amazon public cloud is fully compliant with European data security and privacy requirements.

“We know that up until now, public cloud has only been used by telcos as a sort of bolt on, not for their mission critical core business. It’s now up to us to provide the innovation to change that.”

Asiainfo said it had worked on proof of concepts with some large scale operators last year as a trial, and they are now just waiting for their first real project.

“We have been talking to customers about this for a while and they are interested, because this is the long term future – but it’s still early days,” he said.

“Tier twos can be a lot more innovative and they often belong to the bigger operator groups, which use them to test solutions in different countries. We are seeing this as the future for cloud, but they are not ready to migrate huge subscriber bases. They may be willing to do overlay projects, with a view of then migrating if things go well.”