Really good industry brief here from Alan and Jeff, identifying that cloud-enabled services and applications pertain to both IP Video and business service domains.

There are already a set of Top 10 MSOs who are adopting cloud-enabled video services like TiVO that can be overlaid on existing networks without the requirement for end-to-end IP video delivery network. Premium video and content services 'can be' brought to market quickly by MSOs if they extend their OSS infrastructure by adding subscriber and service-level entitlement management. In essence, orchestrating the service delivery process for a subscriber, service and device level entitlements from a common OSS service layer. Any service or application can then be effectively delivered to a wide-array of devices and viewer screens.

For the business/SMB market segment, cloud services & applications like office collaboration, data back-up, unified communications, conferencing and others can be layered on IP-PBX and SIP Trunking service offerings. The same IT layer of OSS "entitlements" management to enable and provision services from the cloud to business end-users should be an essential part of IT infrastructure planning for MSOs.

In summary, in keys to enabling cloud services, it's not just about network and device-level updates/upgrades to deliver a new age of revenue generation services. The OSS service management systems by MSOs should be revisited and revised to address this trend of more services/applications located 'outside' of the MSOs network.