Cloud Services Brokerages and their International Growth

- Steve Crawford, VP of marketing and business development at Jamcracker, says:

According to Jamcracker’s recent third annual report on cloud adoption trends, 2012 was a year that experienced significant expansion of the Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB) model among traditional and emerging segments; including service providers, IT distributors, organizations building their own partner ecosystems, and enterprise/government IT organizations – and this growth is taking place on a global scale. 

We continue to see significant growth with telecommunication companies in 1^st world markets, such as Telstra in Australia and KPN in Europe, and we’re also seeing a lot of activity in emerging markets such as MTN, who recently launched their cloud services across Africa.  Traditional IT distributors have entered this space in force, enterprise and government is heating up, and we’re seeing lots of interest and activity in many other market segments.  As the CSB industry expands across different geographies and industry segments, it is critical that we continue to evolve our offerings to meet the growing global needs of our customers.

Cloud Service Brokerages

As the cloud computing market matures, the need for aggregators begins to emerge.  Today there are thousands of different cloud providers and, by some estimates, a hundred more are coming to market each week.  CSBs have entered the market to provide the means for organizations to access, provision and manage cloud services from different providers – including infrastructure services, messaging, collaboration, business applications and security cloud offerings.

There are two types of CSBs that exist in the market:

Internal CSBs: These are typically driven by very large IT organizations to provide internal cloud service catalogs for their employees and affiliated members. Examples of Internal CSBs include enterprise and government IT organizations that want to unify cloud delivery and lifecycle management for their employees, universities servicing the IT needs of faculty and students, and healthcare organizations that provide IT services to their extended user communities. The Internal CSB model is becoming increasingly popular as organizations are sourcing more and more of their IT services through public and private clouds.

External CSBs: While they may share many of the needs of internal CSBs, they are focused on monetizing cloud services delivery by aggregating and selling cloud services to their customers and through their channels. Key drivers are generally driving new sources of revenue, differentiating their core offerings to drive market share, and increasing existing customer retention rates and profitability. Examples of external CSBs include telecommunication companies (such as Telstra and MTN), IT distributors and technology providers and OEM marketplaces.

Leveraging Jamcracker

Jamcracker is in the center of this industry growth because we focus on enabling CSBs with the Jamcracker Services Delivery Network (JSDN). The JSDN aggregates different types of cloud services and providers, and gives the CSB a unified cloud catalog that they can offer to their customers and channels. It handles the delivery of these cloud services, which may be the CSB’s own proprietary or third-party services and also includes managed services to help organizations get to market in a quick and cost-effective way. JSDN includes three core components:

Jamcracker Platform: A multi-tiered, multi-tenant cloud delivery and management platform that automates all CSB workflow functions.

Cloud Services Catalog: As a CSB gets up and running, a challenge for them is to build out their ecosystem of service providers. As such, Jamcracker offers them the choice of hundreds of pre-integrated services that are ready to be distributed to their customers, and our customers can also add their own core or partner services.

Managed Services: In order to provide a complete solution, managed services like customer support, vendor management and operations and optional hosting are an important part of the JSDN.

With the international growth in internal and external CSBs, we saw the need for a version of JSDN that specifically caters to the needs of organizations with a presence in multiple countries. The newest version of JSDN 6.0 includes features, such as the ability to set languages, currencies, taxation, time zones, date formats and cloud offerings based on local market needs, significantly lowering operational costs associated with supporting multiple geographical regions.

Cloud computing is a rapidly evolving area and it is important for organizations to keep up with this constant change.  The JSDN enables CSBs to stay at the forefront of innovation, which provides them an important edge over their competitors, and in so doing establishes the CSB model as the most efficient way for organizations to consume and manage the rapidly expanding supply of cloud services.  

About Steve Crawford

Steve is vice president of marketing and business development at Jamcracker. Prior to this position, Steve was CMO and vice president of corporate development for PKWARE, where he helped re-launch the company as a cross-platform data security provider, resulting in 10X revenue growth over three years. He was previously with VeriSign during its growth from pre-IPO to over $2B in revenues, where he led strategic alliances, launched its enterprise solutions product-line, and grew its service provider business to over $200M.  Steve previously led marketing and business development at Octel (acquired by Lucent) and R&D programs at Lockheed Martin.