Reliance Globalcom is rebranding itself as Global Cloud Xchange. To be sure, not all firm branding efforts are hugely consequential. But it is noteworthy when a provider of undersea capacity now talks about its business as part of the “cloud ecosystem globally.”

By definition, cloud-based apps require end user access to resources based at remote data centers. And, in practice, a good amount of that demand is shifted from previously offline distribution methods.

Just as significantly, more of the cloud-based content is entertainment video, a media type that is orders of magnitude more bandwidth-intensive than voice, messaging, and much website content.

So the implication for firms such as Reliance Globalcom is that revenue growth increasingly is driven by supporting customers needing to move large amounts of content--especially video--from one data center to another.

In fact, the bulk of global undersea traffic arguably now consists of video-based Internet applications, hosted from huge data centers.

So one might say the big change is not just a name, but a recognition of how undersea capacity provider business strategy is changing.

Instead of networks optimized for moving symmetrical narrowband traffic from one telco point of presence to another telco point of presence, the long-haul networks now mostly move asymmetrical broadband traffic from one data center to other data centers.

The other important change is the amount of content caching in changing traffic flows.

In fact, by some estimates, metro traffic volume will surpass long-haul traffic in 2014, for example, and will account for 58 percent of total IP traffic by 2017.

That new shift to metro traffic is driven largely the operation of content delivery networks, which will carry more than half of Internet traffic in 2017.

About 51 percent of all Internet traffic will cross content delivery networks  in 2017 globally, up from 34 percent in 2012, according to Cisco.

In fact, metro network traffic will grow nearly twice as fast as long-haul traffic from 2012 to 2017, Cisco argues.

Likewise, content delivery networks will carry 51 percent of Internet traffic in 2017, up from 34 percent in 2012.

Globally, IP video traffic will be 73 percent of all IP traffic (both business and consumer) by 2017, up from 60 percent in 2012. And the sum of all forms of video (TV, video on demand [VoD], Internet, and P2P) will continue to be in the range of 80 and 90 percent of global consumer traffic by 2017, Cisco predicts.

And that is why Reliance Globalcom is becoming Global Cloud Xchange. That’s where the money is going to be, for undersea network services providers.