Telecom companies, historically, are not early adopters of new technology. They often let smaller companies do the ground-breaking missionary work, and once they feel the market is ready to explode, they jump in with both feet and use their size, reach and powerful brands to take emerging technology to the next level. The telcos’ pervasive presence leads to accelerated market adoption of the new offerings, and soon the “emerging technology” tag gives way as the “new stuff” becomes mainstream – and widely accepted as the de facto way of conducting business.

This pattern has repeated itself over the years, and has seen the leading telcos arrive late to the party with services like voice mail. First launched by companies like Octel in the early 1980’s, it wasn’t until the carriers stepped into this market several years later that voice mail exploded. It became a mainstream service, and by the turn of the century boasted 150,000,000 users worldwide (according to Wikipedia).

The same pattern can be seen with routing technology (ask Cisco), mobility services (SMS texting was first done in 1993), PDAs (Blackberry) and even the Internet. When the telcos adopt a service as their own and bring it to market, big things invariably happen.

So, it’s with the telecom sector’s history in mind that today’s announcement by Qwest Communications launching its Real-Time Application Recovery service as a defining moment in the future of the Cloud and the services that it brings to market. 

Qwest is the third largest US telco, and in my view its entering the market for Cloud delivered services legitimizes the Cloud like never before. Telcos are all about security, reliability, trust and performance and Qwest’s presence sends a strong message to the market that the Cloud is ready for prime-time services like Cloud Recovery, Server Replication and Cloud Storage. No longer can the Cloud and the services it enables be viewed as an option for businesses to consider. 

The Cloud is real, it’s here to stay and thanks to market leaders like Qwest, it will soon become part of the mainstream technology menu –with businesses of all shapes and sizes partaking in the financial and operational benefits that the Cloud delivers.

Today we can say, “Remember when companies didn’t have voice mail?” and there are many who couldn’t imagine functioning in such an era. I believe that the time is coming, and soon, when we’ll able to say, “Remember when companies had downtime…?” 


ABOUT ME
Joshua Geist is Founder and CEO of Geminare Incorporated, a leading provider of turnkey business continuity, server replication and data protection solutions and innovator of the Cloud “Recovery as a Service™” model. A solution junkie at heart, Joshua lives, breathes and dreams of all things DR Cloud-related and loves nothing better than to hear a story about how another customer experienced first-hand the tremendous value inherent in the technology that Geminare created.

Joshua lives in Toronto, with his lovely wife Liane and three beautiful daughters, Samantha, Chloe and Alexa – with a combined age of 8! Suffice to say that between introducing the world to Geminare’s RaaS and raising a family, Josh is a very busy guy but always seems to be reachable at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or followed on Twitter @CloudRecovery.