Mike D’s Blog

As I stated on Tuesday, I was speaking on a cloud panel at a TMForum event last week. It was a really great event. One of the things that TMForum announced the day that I was down there was the Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council. It’s a really interesting group that combines leading Enterprises in the cloud space with leading Service Providers/Telcos in the cloud space to figure out what Enterprises really need from a cloud. This is something that nearly everyone I’ve talked to in the cloud vendor world has struggled to truly understand. Sure there are some base requirements out there:

• Fast provisioning


• Security


• Support for enterprise apps and operating systems


• Etc

To date though people have pretty much taken a “build it and they will come” approach. While that’s fine it’s really hard to get to the commodity type of pricing that consumers want when you have to put out a lot of CapEx in order to stand up capacity on services you hope the market will consume. It’s much easier for the business to have a set of requirements to operate against. It’s the aim of this new council to work on those requirements.

Just looking through the press release on the first vendors to sign up I see a lot of familiar names:

• Alcatel-Lucent


• Amdocs


• AT&T


• BT


• CA


• Cisco


• EMC


• HP


• IBM


• Microsoft


• Nokia Siemens Networks


• Telecom Italia


• Telstra


• Deutsche Bank


• Commonwealth Bank of Australia

I’ve been working with pretty much everyone on that list to build up their cloud service so I know for a fact that all are advanced enough in cloud that we should get a good list of requirements from this group. More will be coming into the fold soon from the enterprise side to join the two enterprises already on the list.

What’s even better is this organization is also working with the DMTF. The DMTF seems to be the one common group that all of the standards orgs and bodies are working with. They already have a formal relationship with CSA (the Cloud Security Alliance) and an informal one with OCCI (the Open Cloud Computing Initiative).

Make sure you follow this org closely and sign your own organization up to help with the effort if you’re getting into cloud. Of course I’d really like to see more enterprises in this group than vendors in order to get good material out. Right now it’s too heavy on the vendor side of the house.

Here’s a list of things they are currently working on to keep your eyes on:

• Common Cloud Services Product Definitions


• Cloud Security Issues


• Cloud-to-Cloud Interoperability, Data Portability and APIs


• Service Provider Benchmarking


• Buyer-demand Forecasting


• Federated Cloud Stores


• Cloud Service Level Agreement Process Management


• Cloud Network Performance and Latency Issues

I’d be interested to hear other’s thoughts on this new buying council and the impact to the industry.