Q&A: BT's Gary Bruce on the Cloud Service Broker Catalyst

Got your head in the cloud?  There will certainly be a lot of discussion around the challenges and opportunities cloud services present next week at Management World 2010 in Nice.  For conference attendees wanting to experience key cloud management concepts, and forward-looking collaborations among communications service providers (CSPs), technology suppliers and enterprise customers, Forumville is a must!

Gary Bruce, Catalyst lead and project champion at BT Innovate & Design, answers a couple of questions about the Cloud Service Broker Catalyst (CSB), which will demonstrate a trusted, governed cloud management platform, to simplify the delivery of complex, cloud services to enterprise customers.

Q: How is the CSB Catalyst addressing the barriers to cloud adoption for enterprise customers?

A: Although cloud services offer many attractive benefits, enterprises are naturally concerned about losing control over IT governance.  Issues, such as maintaining application performance, delivering adequate security, preventing runaway costs and complying with regional or sector regulations, create significant barriers for cloud adoption.

The CSB Catalyst project starts to address these issues by developing a trusted interface between the enterprise and cloud service environments. This facilitates a secure, highly performing cloud-based environment for enterprise activity that operates in accordance with each organization’s own governance rules.

Using the CSB Catalyst, enterprises can benefit from cloud models, like pay-as-you-go, ‘OPEX not CAPEX’, and automatic scaling on demand, while retaining control and avoiding lock-in with any single underlying cloud platform.  The CSB also benefits cloud service providers by enabling them to offer services with transparent governance, and providing levels of control and assurance which would otherwise be difficult and costly to achieve.

Q: What will the demonstration scenario on display in Forumville entail?

A: The CSB Catalyst is acting on some of the primary requirements from TM Forum’s Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council, and explores the use of TM Forum standards to facilitate the cloud service broker function.  In particular, the CSB Catalyst employs the Product and Service Assembly (PSA) standard to facilitate automated interworking between each of the catalyst’s collaborators with respect to cloud service assembly and deployment.

The CSB Catalyst demonstration in Forumville will highlight:

• Bringing a cloud product, including customer service level agreements, quickly and easily to market through the use of PSA catalogs to manage the service components and product lifecycle;
• Fulfilling a customer order to meet both functionality requirements, and those for application performance, security, cost control and compliance, to the point of billing for the enabled product;
• Responding to service quality challenges, for example, the dynamic creation of new capacity as a result of dips in application performance due to increased demand; and
• Making status, activities, events and responses within the cloud service environment transparent and evident to both cloud service brokers and enterprise customers.

Q: How will the project takeaways help BT in the real world as a buyer and seller of complex cloud services?

A: Through the CSB Catalyst, BT hopes to make the provisioning of cloud services more easily accessible and viable for enterprises, and enable buyers to capitalize on the benefits of complex cloud services, while having the control they need over IT governance.

The initiative can also help cloud service brokers improve their customers’ experiences, by providing the best available resources at any given time, reducing service delivery bottlenecks and minimizing the effects of resource contention.

We hope that the Catalyst will encourage the adoption of cloud services, and open up new revenue opportunities for operators and cloud service providers.

To learn more about the CSB Catalyst, which also involves Comptel, Infonova, OpenNMS Group and Square Hoop, head over to Level 3 in the Agora 3 Mezzanine during the following hours:

Tuesday, May 18 from 12:30 – 19:00

Wednesday, May 19 from 10:00 – 19:00

Thursday, May 20 from 10:00 – 14:30

Management World Nice Survival Guide

It’s that time of the year again—conference season!  Comptel is looking forward to Management World 2010 in Nice, where we will be taking part in a number of initiatives, reconnecting with customers and partners, and talking about the latest industry issues and opportunities. 

To help you prepare for the event, we’ve compiled our five top tips for ‘surviving and thriving’ at this year’s show.

• Have a plan. Familiarize yourself with the expo and Forumville layouts and decide how you are going to spend your time—don’t forget to swing by our booth, #21!  Determine which keynote sessions and presentations you’d like to attend, and when you need to make time for any pre-arranged customer or partner meetings.

• Pace yourself. You can’t do and see everything at the show, so try and stick to your plan.  Walking to and from and about the show is good exercise, but it will also wear you out!  A well-paced day (and taking time to bask in the sun outside of the Acropolis Convention Centre) will leave you rested enough to enjoy Nice by night.

• Bring enough business cards. This is one of the best opportunities to network with others in the industry, and it would be a shame to miss out.  Following the event, connect with your new contacts through LinkedIn and on other social networks like Twitter.

• Participation is king. Everyone has been talking about Management World 2010 over the past few weeks; stay engaged in the conversations during and after the event.  Add your comments to related blog posts, and tweet live (#mw2010) from the tradeshow—your thoughts and common experiences will go a long way in forging relationships.

• Don’t forget to enjoy the conference goodies. As always, you can find the famous Finnish milk chocolate—Fazer Blue—at our stand in the expo hall.

Have any additional Management World ‘survival’ tips to share?  We invite you to leave a comment.  Look forward to seeing you in Nice next week!

Will you be in Management World 2010 in Nice next week?

Can’t believe Management World 2010 is just a week away!  Comptel and our customers and partners have been quite busy preparing for it.  Here’s a brief overview of some of the key activities we’ll be involved in at the Nice event.

CTO Gareth Senior and Ralf Jaeger from partner Cisco Systems’ Worldwide Managed Services Team will be teaming up for a presentation as part of TM Forum’s Successful Business Transformation Summit.  On Tuesday, May 18 at 5 p.m., head over to the session, to hear about and discuss managed services’ vital role in enhancing the overall customer experience, maintaining competitive advantage and modernizing communications service providers’ (CSPs) systems to handle the ever-changing telecom environment.

Customer Telecom Personal Argentina will also be speaking at the show.  Kick off the Revenue Management & Profitability Summit with Leticia San Juan on Wednesday, May 19 at 10 a.m.  She’ll explain how the CSP was able to meet business goals, such as reducing the duration of the activation process duration, with an integrated self-service solution.

Don’t forget about the Catalyst stands in Forumville!  Comptel is participating in three of these collaborative initiatives at Management World 2010.  We’ll be on hand with our fellow participants to discuss the Inter-Cloud Service Management (from a service fulfillment perspective), Cloud Service Broker (from a service-layer active catalog and design studio perspective) and Service Model (from a federated product and service catalog perspective) Catalysts.

For those going to Nice, we hope you’ll swing by booth #21 and say hello.