TM Forum: Jamcracker plays broker to help telco cloud plans

Small businesses no longer want the expense of having to buy, deploy and manage their own software — something K.B. Chandrasekhar, founder and CEO of Jamcracker believes should be of great interest to more telecom service providers.

To take advantage of that opportunity, the long-time hosted services platform vendor is readying the launch of a new “cloud service broker” solution, one that will find it providing to service providers many of the “middle-man” and enabling duties they need to launch cloud services for their own customers. Jamcracker’s cloud service broker for infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service solutions will be available by June, Chandrasekhar said.

The cloud-enabling solution will be available through a pre-integrated catalog of pre-built services (and associated services involving billing support, settlements, end-user application support) — all intended to help carriers manage the lifecycle of delivering cloud-based services.

“The goal is to help service providers offer public and private cloud offerings, to which they are well suited,” Chandrasekhar said. “After all, they already know intimately the concept of ‘scale,’ and they are well versed in security, from the authentication and authorization, tracking and auditing they already do. And they already have well-established data centers, and they understand subscription billing—an essential element in the pay-as-you-go model of cloud.”

Chandrasekhar claims the combination of Jamcracker’s platform and suite of services will help carriers go live with broadband-enabled cloud services within 120 days. “Usually more than a month is dedicated to just creating a marketing plan and yet another to user acceptance testing and trials, and then yet another for actual implementation,” he said. “For carriers that want to focus on their core competencies, we’ve already done the slicing and dicing to target different customer bases with different product packages.”

The solution is designed to provide everything from selection to provisioning, to single sign-on, settlements, billing, metering and level-one and level-two support through pre-built components. “We have standardized on best practices we have assembled through 12 carrier implementations,” Chandrasekhar said, referring to implementations with such customers as Telstra in Australia or eircom in Europe. Rather than go it alone, Jamcracker is partnering with Juniper and Nokia Siemens Networks to ensure the suite of cloud services has in-network, real-time capabilities to ensure service quality and deliver unique services.

Chandrasekhar believes carriers can address the requirements of both small businesses and large enterprises with cloud offerings. “For smaller companies, it is the carrier that can serve as the IT department and deliver via the Internet all the applications those customers need to run their businesses,” he said.

For larger enterprises, Chandrasekhar believes carriers will not only simplify procurement, billing and support, but also help piece together disparate cloud services into a single whole – a major value add for large enterprise customers. “Since a carrier can provide cloud services that are aggregated and delivered from a single platform, enterprise IT departments can centrally and consistently manage security, passwords, single sign-on, compliance and administration processes across multiple cloud offerings from a single management interface,” he said.

As the solution evolves, Jamcracker plans to add features to help with “mission-critical usage” such as SLA management, federated services and robust integration back into the enterprise.