The collaboration, which also involves Comptel Corporation, Infonova, OpenNMS Group and Square Hoop, will look at the role of the CSB in addressing enterprise cloud customer concerns in areas such as application performance, security and vendor lock-in. The platform will be demonstrated at Management World 2010, taking place May 18-20, 2010 in Nice.
In this TM Forum Catalyst project, developed by BT’s Innovate & Design organisation, BT Global Services will serve as both an enterprise consumer and retailer of a number of complex cloud services. The project, consisting of a definition and development phase and a final demonstration, will explore the aggregation, delivery and operation of cloud services while addressing a variety of trust and governance requirements.
The CSB Catalyst will address a number of the key concerns for Cloud adoption highlighted by TM Forum’s Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council (ECBC). The ECBC represents the interests of large Enterprise buyers and is the cornerstone of TM Forum’s managing Cloud Services Initiative, an ecosystem of cloud buyers and sellers of which BT is a key member. The goal of the ecosystem is to drive Tm Forum’s Cloud Services Initiative in order to improve the understanding of the needs of enterprise cloud buyers and to remove any potential barriers to the uptake of cloud technology.
Comptel will provide an order portal and active service catalog, to manage the different components of a service, as well as a service designer to aid the rapid assembly of cloud services. These concepts were initially demonstrated though previous catalyst collaborations with BT, namely the Product and Service Assembly (PSA) initiative and the Service Model catalyst.
Infonova will provide a billing catalog and billing engine, to manage the monetization of cloud services, and to enable the enterprise customer to be virtual operators of these services.
OpenNMS will provide monitoring services as part of service assurance
Square Hoop, through product catalogs, will orchestrate what is presented to the enterprise customer by aggregating product, service and billing information.
“As the cloud services market matures, there is the potential for these offerings to develop into complex combinations of services from a range of trusted and less trusted sources,” said Gary Bruce, catalyst lead, BT Innovate & Design. “The CSB Catalyst will explore resolutions to the issues that enterprises face when buying these types of combination cloud services and put in place the governance, security and transparency that will be imperative to their adoption.”