Virgin Media, UK's Biggest Cable TV Provider Joins the Cloud

The largest Television Cable provider in UK, Virgin Media have decided recently to explore other income generating potential for the company. It will use its current fiber optic cable network as its leverage to venture into a cloud-based data center business.

The vision for the cloud will be shared with business partner Savvis, an Information Communications Technology (ICT) vendor. In their partnership, Virgin Media will provide the high-speed network access while Savvis will deliver the cloud computing IT resources.

Their cloud-based services will target medium sized businesses with about 250 to 1000 employees that are assumed to have a need for huge cloud data storage system for their IT business solutions.

Virgin Media hopes to make a breakthrough for Europe in providing new grounds for how business is done, providing an end-to-end cloud ICT package. Virgin Media has positive foresight that cost savings from recurring monthly fees and the cost of having an in-house IT infrastructure will attract many medium sized enterprises. The services they will offer will be on a pay-per-service scheme.

Although Virgin Media is the leading TV cable provider that has excellent understanding of the communications industry, it still needs to brace itself for more challenges ahead. The company needs to strengthen its IT foundation like in issues of setting workloads, cloud-based system run-time, and data migration. And although they have acquired Savvis to do the job, success depends on a well-thought process and not just cloud connections.

Savvis on the other hand, a multinational cloud provider could provide the link to other countries in the global market. This is to address the fact that Virgin Media’s network is only limited to the UK.

Information that Virgin Media needs to study further is their claim that television customers consume peak hours between 6 to 10 in the evening and that business enterprises will have peak hours in the morning consuming the network’s off-peak run-time. This may be true several years back, but with the current trend of global economy, Internet marketing and web-based business solutions this belief is no longer applicable.

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