Cloud service providers and technology suppliers are joining with users to collaborate on a comprehensive programme for accelerating commercial availability of managed and secure cloud services

Keith Willetts: a number of barriers must be overcome before cloud can become a success

Juhani Hintikka: technical evolution offers the possibility to rethink business models

Major industry players — including operators, vendors and corporate users — are uniting into a council to promote and develop cloud computing.

They are working under the aegis of the TM Forum, the telecoms industry group which has grown from a focus on OSS and BSS to a wider interest in the business effectiveness for the communications and media sectors.

The centrepiece of this effort is the creation of the Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council, whose goal is to understand the needs of the largest global cloud buyers and ensure any impediments to the uptake of cloud technology are removed.

Together with key service and technology suppliers, the ecosystem will initiate a range of projects designed to remove barriers to the growth of commercial cloud services.

Among the enterprise buyers joining this effort are Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Deutsche Bank.

“Cloud computing has the potential to have a significant influence on enterprise IT in the type, quality and price of the services we create and consume,” stated Sean Kelley, global CIO for Deutsche Asset Management. “But a number of challenges remain.”

Transparency and efficiency

The new council is led by Eric Pulier, as executive director. “The ECBC represents an opportunity to affect the global information technology marketplace, bringing transparency and efficiency to the relationship between buyers and sellers,” said Pulier, a serial entrepreneur who is executive chairman of SOA Software.

“By lowering the gating factors for widespread adoption of cloud services, the ECBC can accelerate the shift to the next era in computing.”

The ECBC will seek to understand the needs of commercial cloud services buyers, set strategy and launch specific work programmes. All work on specific projects will be done collaboratively within the broader eco-system, with the buyers providing guidance and best practice requirements.

So far Alcatel-Lucent, Amdocs, AT&T, BT, CA, Cisco, EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Nokia Siemens Networks, Telecom Italia and Telstra have agreed to join the programme as well as industry organisations including the Distributed Management Task Force, which focuses on developing management standards, and the IT service management organisation, itSMF, with its focus on service delivery.

“The demand for cloud services holds significant potential for the industry, and it’s just at the start of its evolution,” explained Keith Willetts, chairman and CEO of the TM Forum. “However, there are a number of barriers that must be overcome before cloud can become a mass-market success, and the Forum is well placed to act as an orchestrator to address these challenges.”

Several candidate areas for work have already been identified including:

• common cloud services product definitions;
• cloud security issues;
• cloud-to-cloud interoperability and data portability;
• service provider benchmarking;
• buyer-demand forecasting;
• federated cloud stores;
• cloud service level agreement process management;
• cloud network performance and latency issues.

Several proof-of-concept technology catalyst demonstrations have already started as a way of accelerating development of solutions including one on common service catalogue definitions.

Kenneth Frank, Alcatel-Lucent’s president of solutions and marketing, welcomed the move. “Cloud services are offered through a variety of business models, leveraging a multitude of disciplines and technologies, that will need to be integrated together to make this initiative successful.”

Important issues

At Hewlett-Packard, Ananda Subbiah, the company’s vice president for enterprise services in its Asia-Pacific and Japan region, said: “Many customers recognise the benefits of cloud computing but have important issues that need to be addressed before fully considering cloud services as part of their technology roadmap.”

Operators too are supporting the initiative. Joe Weinman, executive director for strategy and business development at AT&T Business Solutions, said: “We welcome TM Forum’s initiative in helping to further accelerate the emerging ecosystem of cloud service providers and make it even easier for enterprise buyers to acquire these services. AT&T has been a global network and IT services provider for years, and cloud computing represents the evolution of networking and technology being used by enterprises to derive even greater value from their communication assets.”

Another operator to back the move is BT. Phil Dance, who heads the company’s research centre at Adastral Park in the UK, said: “Cloud offers huge opportunities for customers and for the suppliers serving those customers. The nature of cloud services needs vendors, communications and service providers and industry bodies to design and build services and components that work together in a seamless cloud environment. This initiative will help to make this happen.”

Juhani Hintikka, head of operations and business software at Nokia Siemens Networks, said: “We have seen fast technical development in virtualisation and cloud computing especially in IT, but also in the telecommunications business, ranging from end-user applications to the networks.”

“Service providers that thrive in the new SaaS/cloud game will offer a one-stop-shop for their business customers’ ICT needs,” said Seth Nesbitt, vice president of products and solutions at billing and OSS company Amdocs.

Ajei Gopal, CA’s executive vice president of products and technology, agreed: “CA believes that the cloud fundamentally changes the way IT services are created, deployed, delivered and managed.”

The move is the latest development of the wide interest range of the TM Forum, which over the past few years has absorbed a number of organisations such as the Global Billing Association and ITSphere, an industry group which promotes a highly reliable alternative to the public internet suitable to carry telecoms and other critical services.

“The advent of cloud computing has created many opportunities for service providers and technology suppliers alike, yet the notion of managing large scale multi-tenancy in the cloud presents a variety of challenges,” said Joe Wojtal, vice president for operations and systems development at Cisco.

Dramatic IT shift

At EMC’s cloud infrastructure group, senior vice president and general manager Mike Feinberg said the development of cloud computing is “one of the most dramatic IT shifts in decades”.

The Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council will help to bring “a cloud ecosystem together to work through customers’ current – and future – roadblocks including cloud security, trusting the cloud, and standards”, he said. “EMC is excited about collaborating with the TM Forum and its members to streamline service provider adoption and delivery of cloud services.”

At Microsoft, senior vice president Amitabh Srivastava identified service interoperability as a challenge. “Microsoft recognises that hosted services must be able to interact reliably within one cloud, across private and public clouds, and between different service provider infrastructures. Services must be manageable end-to-end.”

Srivastava is VP of the software company’s Windows Azure cloud services operating system. “The TM Forum’s work on interoperability is especially helpful for the industry to deliver on the promise of cloud computing.”

There is a general acceptance in the industry that cloud is the future. “HP believes that everything will be delivered as a service — from computing power to business process to personal interactions — whenever and wherever customers need it,” said Subbiah. “As a member of the TM Forum, we look forward to collaborating with other industry leaders to provide customers the insight and resolutions they need to continue their cloud journey.”

Strategic options

Other companies supported the move. “Technical evolution offers new strategic options and the possibility to rethink business models and ecosystems,” said Hintikka at NSN. “The TM Forum’s cloud initiative is an example of this type of evolution and we’re keen to contribute our deep understanding of OSS/BSS.”

Frank commented: “Alcatel-Lucent will work closely with the TM Forum and other cloud initiative participants to further develop requirements and design solutions for service providers.” It is a “rapidly evolving market”, said Frank.

“Service providers will need to offer a diversified portfolio of applications and services, with support from the OSS/BSS and SDP,” said Nesbitt. “Amdocs will work closely with the TM Forum to formulate the technical and commercial strategies to accelerate new business models.”

The key aim of the new council is “to help accelerate widespread commercial success of cloud services so that both users and providers benefit”, said Gopal at CA. His company hopes to offer “deep understanding of the critical role automation, service assurance and security management play in building, deploying, operating and using cloud services”.

Security is a concern, said Wojtal at Cisco. “We will continue to listen to customers’ priorities and concerns around cloud and will work collaboratively with organisations such as the TM Forum to address these and help drive adoption of commercial cloud services.” There is a need to help service providers supply “the infrastructure and solutions needed to deliver secure public cloud services”.

IBM’s cloud computing vice president, Mike Hill, agreed that a “top priority” is to work “with the entire ecosystem to identify security concerns” as well as to work on service level agreements and to “begin work to develop standards to prevent lock-in”.

The other industry organisations, DMTF and itSMF, already work with the TM Forum in a number of areas. “Open industry collaboration will play an integral role in accelerating adoption of cloud services,” said Winston Bumpus, president of DMTF.

Keith Aldis, chief executive of itSMF, called it a “challenging new area”. GTB