Let the sun shine through your core cloud competency

On current performance, Informa concludes that portfolio differentiation remains fairly limited across operators. Mass-market services are being favored while the vertical industry applications accounted just 11% of the Telecom cloud services in 2011. Many CSPs are swapping their dumb-pipe problem for a dumb cloud: 70% of the 88 cloud services launched in the first half of 2011 were generic productivity and storage applications, often involving partners claiming a major share of the takings. This leads CSPs to a dumb pipe destiny. Obvious question that arises is how this destiny can be prevented? Today’s blog answers this question.

I believe that the true potential of the cloud can be harnessed by intelligent connected processes and by rapid innovation and customization of applications. Resale of commodity SaaS won’t change the bleak destiny. Cloud Services broker harvesting the benefits of APaaS (Application Platform-as-a-Service) and iPaaS (Integration Platform-as-a-Service) can drive the profitable differentiation of services. In addition, developing M2M capabilities alongside cloud offerings can help operators to really differentiate in a competitive market.

Gartner and Forrester predict PaaS to be 5-8% of the total cloud computing segments, contrary to SaaS, which accounts 85-90% of total. I believe differentiated PaaS can be leveraged to generate additional revenue streams by creating customized and configurable offerings for B2B and B2B4C scenarios. CSPs can benefit from additional revenue on Business Process-as-a-Service (BPaaS) by allowing customer specific process orchestration across individual cloud services. For example, think about combining Google Apps or MS Office 365 with Salesforce or SugarCRM into a customer specific Order-to-Cash process. Key lies in the differentiation of services.

There has been a major rise in the number of players jumping to the iPaaS train – AtomSphere Integration Cloud from Dell Boomi, Snaplogic, UC4, Pervasive Integration, to name a few. Especially the concept of SnapStore from Snaplogic looks quite promising. SnapLogic Snaps are modular collections of integration components built for a specific application or data source. SnapStore is a library of these snaps, which allows you to buy these snaps like you buy apps in an Apple AppStore.

Here I would like to mention Cordys, which provides both iPaaS and APaaS in a single stack and also enables service providers to offer BPaaS and Dynamic apps services. It offers services providers the unique opportunity to overcome the rapid commoditization of their existing services business and build a true service aggregation platform, an intelligent Cloud Broker, which they can leverage for a wide range of service portfolio elements. Cordys creates differentiation and adds value by personalizing SaaS, NaaS, mobile, processes and other services, whether on-premise or in the cloud. In case of an operator environment, Cordys can be used to combine existing digital assets like:

• OSS/BSS operations (wrapped order, billing, CRM processes etc.)
• NaaS (messaging, billing, location, user profile etc.)
• Mobile PaaS
• Modular packages on top of vanilla PaaS to support vertical community clouds (e.g. healthcare, public sector, retail, energy & utilities, finance)
• And of course commodity SaaS

Key highlights of Cordys offering are:

• Rapidly innovate and create high value, high margin value added services by combining and personalizing existing digital assets
• Create unique, personalized solutions comprising vanilla SaaS, existing systems and cloud enabled competency
• Compose specific, tailored, self-assembly value added services and composite business applications
• Decouple to avoid cost and complexity
• Support specific vertical industries community clouds

Let the sun shine through your core cloud competency to clear the fog surrounding the profitable services differentiation. Stay tuned for more details, alternatively feel free to contact in case of further information.