New group asks large enterprises for cloud input

A group of large service providers and some of the world’s largest enterprises joined together today to help define how telco-provided cloud services should be delivered.

The TM Forum’s new Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council, announced at the forum’s Management World event today, was created to better match real enterprise needs with fledgling carrier cloud service offerings.

Founding members Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Deutsche Bank are leading the charge on the enterprise side, with service providers including AT&T, BT, Telstra and Telecom Italia and vendors such as Alcatel-Lucent, Amdocs, CA, Cisco, EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft and Nokia Siemens Networks rounding out the group.

“There’s an amount of hype around the cloud; it’s going to affect everything we do [as an industry],” said Keith Willetts, Chairman and CEO of the TM Forum, announcing the new council from the Management World keynote stage this morning. “Virtual computing applications are a significant change in the way we all do business.”

While many of the concepts of cloud computing emerged from the Web and IT industries, communications service providers – particularly large global providers like council members AT&T or BT – are well-positioned to deliver managed cloud services that combine their global IP networks and worldwide data centers.

The new buyer’s council will build specific work programs around the need to understand the market and specifically the relationship between companies that consume, deliver and provide enabling technologies for cloud services. In particular, the group will attempt to create common product definitions; identify security, interoperability and data portability issues; deliver service provider benchmarking tools and studies; forecast buyer demand; and examine more advanced issues like federated cloud storage, cloud service level agreements (SLAs) and more.

The forum debuted several proof-of-concept “catalyst” demonstrations in the Forumville area of this week’s event to demonstrate the possibilities for service provider cloud offerings.

The TM Forum is announcing a number of additional programs this week, including a new program on
Managing New Services, to help service providers manage two-sided service opportunities where, rather than own the customer relationship soup-to-nuts, they play various middleman roles in the value chain.

Service providers are on the cusp of moving to a new world of 4G mobile services, the TM Forum’s Willett’s said, adding that service providers need to recapture their central role in delivering mobile services from upstarts like Apple and Google. “We didn’t get it right with 3G. The opportunity is to get it right this time [with 4G],” he said. Playing a middleman or enabling role in tomorrow’s 4G value chain – while generating significant and value and revenue from that new role, requires “a fundamental change on how you architect your systems and work in value chains and partnerships.”