Every now and then, you’re fortunate to meet people who instantly get the idea you’re trying to get across. And I am sure that you agree with me that this usually triggers a great conversation.
It happened to me last week when I spoke with the CTO of a regional IT service provider based in the US, active in hosting and managed services. We were discussing the challenges of cloud provisioning and cloud brokerage and the different solutions available in the marketplace for IaaS provisioning.
We talked about how quite some tools nowadays support straightforward handling of provisioning requests for standard cloud infrastructure service offerings. But it gets complicated if these services would be offered as a bundle with dependencies between them and the need for integration of those services.
Here’s the picture that I used to illustrate that challenge. How do you quickly assemble a solution from various services on different levels of the stack? It’s like assembling this car from a number of building blocks randomly packed in a box.
The ‘car assembling’ metaphor illustrates the challenge of managing, provisioning and metering of on-premise and cloud based services that make up a new product, value added service or application.
The idea of using these services as building blocks to assemble a solution has some far reaching implications for cloud service providers. First of all, you need a catalog in order to offer such solutions for a certain price and a Service Level Agreement. You need to be able to provision the solution, which may require that you manage the dependencies for provisioning and even integrate, aggregate and orchestrate these building blocks so that they become a solution for your customer. You need to offer (delegated) administration rights to your customer enabling them in managing user- and application provisioning through self-service portals. And of course, you should be able to keep track of the actual usage so that you can invoice the customer.
So, as a cloud broker, it’s important that you can offer more than just individual services out-of-the-box. The better you are at offering those building blocks as an assembled solution, the more you will offer differentiation with your service.
Here’s where a different perspective on “out-of-the-box” comes to play. For cloud service providers differentiating through value-added services it is vital to win and retain customers. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible to stay in the business with an offering of commodity services only. Service providers may well need to offer services from competing providers, if those services have become a commodity in the market. As long as the higher-level “aggregated” service creates that value-add, you will create solutions that have a knack for “sticking” to your customer.
Here’s the viewpoint that I brought on in the conversation that really triggered the CTO, as it exactly represented the vision he is selling in his organization.
The Cloud Ecosystem (Click on the image to enlarge)
He commented that indeed he should be able to offer IaaS services from the likes of Amazon, if his customer would accept that this service comes with a different SLA. His organization should really act as the broker for the various players in the game and create unified offerings for the customer.
From that perspective, the provider’s own infrastructure services are just one of alternatives offered to the customer. The real value is in offering and managing the solution bundles and picking the services with the best price – performance ratio from the different XaaS layers.
I brought up the example of how we are delivering the Cordys platform as a service for a large global manufacturing company. For a number of reasons, we operate the service from Rackspace in the US. Disaster recovery for this service however, is organized through AWS. For Cordys, such a decision is pretty easy, as we do not own any datacenters. Service Providers need to think (and act) out-of-the-box, that way acknowledging that they should be able to offer more than what comes as a standard from their own “box”.
An overarching provisioning engine that crosses all the XaaS levels, and is supported by a strong platform to do service integration, aggregation and orchestration is a pretty vital solution for Service Providers to play the cloud brokerage game. I’ll stop the promotion here 
Here’s my recommendation for Service Providers with the ambition to become a cloud broker: Think out-of-the-box to create a different, more valuable “box”.
I am eager to get your view on Cloud Brokerage and if you share this vision!
NOTE: If you like the pictures: they’re extracts from a slide-deck which may help you sell the vision in your organization and I’m more than happy to share it with you.
The post Cloud Brokerage – Two “Out-Of-The-Box” perspectives appeared first on Business Process Innovation - Cordys Blog.