Capgemini Public and Hybrid Cloud - Service Brokering

Subtitle:  "Turning Days Into Hours"

 

Results of survey of 460 Execs:

- 45% of decisions to buy cloud services are in the business not in IT

- most claim to have a cloud strategy, most are being cautious adopters

- claiming 78% of new deployments are to cloud (CG did not clarify if this included internal cloud)

- want to move from CapEx to OpEx

- would like to move faster to cloud but secuirty, data sovereignty are main concerns

 

Service provision evolution:

- All internal IT services

- All IT services delivered by one external supplier outsourcing

- IT services delivered by multiple outsourcing

- Future will be micro sourcing of cloud services (according to CG)

Managing so many suppliers will be complex and not easy to control

 

 

Using a platform based on VMware vCD, vCAC, IT Business Manager (ITBM) and BMC software, CG are building what is essentially a brokerage service, or will be when they have completed their current work.  They are not building their own data centres, but partnering across mutiple service provider clouds.  GC are a member of the Open DC Alliance.  It will be pre-packaged "business solutions" catalogue across multiple application providers.  These will include intergration services across multiple IaaS and SaaS providers were necessary (and will, of course, mean lock-in to CG if no-one else is offering just the pre-packaged business service you need).

 

Customer will have choice of commercials and service levels driven by policy based provisioning.  Consolidated billing (with GC fees added of course) will be available across all the elements making up a business service.

 

It won't be quite brokerage yet, but CG see it moving that way, with trading of services like commodities.  At the moment there is no standard way of describing services and service level which makes commodity trading difficult until standards are reached. CG are using an "API factory" in India to build the interfaces to and from different service offerings.

The software in use will provide users with a dashboard of their services and costs and an administration view.  Also provides CG with their view of consumption, costs, margins, SLA performance etc.

 

 



Thoughts: Looks like a great idea to offer pre-packaged services.  From what we saw today it looks like there's still a little way to go in completing the development and getting a real service offering to market.  It has real potential, CG will need to focus on the largest market first to prove the model works, then they will have an extremely complex job building and maintaining all those interfaces and changes to those interfaces over time.  I hope they can make it work as this has potential to be game changing in the market.