cross pond high tech

Fast-growing cloud service platform providers such as AppDirect bring telcos closer to their business customers.

Developing the services and attaining the skills to meet the demands of enterprise users is challenging, but that's where cloud services and platform providers come in. Gartner Inc.  predicts this fast-growing segment will account for 20% of all cloud service usage in 2015, compared with 5% in 2013.

It's becoming a popular way for operators to reach out to business customers. The latest to join the party is Telstra Corp. Ltd., which says its new apps marketplace for SMEs is designed to remove "the complexity out of choosing and managing apps from different vendors."

The Australian operator is using a white-label platform from AppDirect , which also counts Comcast Corp., Deutsche Telekom AG and TeliaSonera AB as customers.

AppDirect, founded in Sydney five years ago but now based in San Francisco, is one of the largest of these cloud middlemen. Richard Dufty, vice president of worldwide sales at AppDirect, says the business was created to bring together "buyers and sellers from two different spectrums who could not get access to each other."

Verizon Communications Inc., the second-largest U.S. telephone company, is boosting its FiOS Internet speeds to 500 megabits a second, faster than Comcast Corp.’s speediest service and half that of Google Inc.’s.

If Google is allowed to go after specific neighborhoods and homes in Austin, Texas, AT&T says it should be able to snag the same terms and conditions for its own fiber-optic deployment.

"I think you are going to see that begin to manifest itself around the United States, and in not just AT&T and Google. You will see others doing this because the demand for really high-speed broadband via gigabit-type fiber-based solutions on a targeted basis is going to be very, very high," Stephenson said.