Audiences at conference panel sessions sometimes come away with the notion that the panelists had their heads in the clouds. In most instances, this is not a compliment.
At this year’s Billing & OSS World Conference, though, some panel participants will take that kind of summary judgment as meaning they did their jobs well, because they followed the theme of “Transforming Your Business Through Cloud Computing.”
Cloud computing, for the uninitiated still wondering whether to attend this session, is the latest buzzword in an industry that loves buzzwords. It’s the IMS of 2009, although, to some, it’s nothing more than an advanced version of the ASP, or application service provider, model. Cloud computing advocates, incidentally, generally take umbrage to the thought that their new process is a renamed version of an old one. And even if it is, they’ll tell you, it’s better. And this time it can already be seen working for the enterprise.
“Cloud computing is more mainstream in the enterprise these days. They’re trying to do more unique things with it so we’re trying to figure out what are the big challenges and hurdles that you need to overcome and what’s next in the enterprise,” said Brian O’Rourke, the panel’s moderator whose full-time job is managing director of communications and media practice at Acumen Solutions.
In this case an enterprise is a carrier trying to offload in-house IT tasks and functions to a managed service provider (MSP) that stores functions and tasks in the IP cloud. The panelists will present a case for cloud computing and try to allay concerns about messing with in-house activities that have long been considered battlegrounds for information technology gurus.
“I think everyone is going to have a slightly different approach to the challenges and the priorities,” O’Rourke said. “One company might see security as the biggest challenge and for other companies it might be that security is really important but the biggest challenge is to get any kind of data strategy.”
Security was a concern at Sprint, where Daniel Sieff, senior manager of CRM/sales force automation had to convince “various departments ... that this was a safe, secure solution for the sensitive customer data we store and that there was no risk of losing or having our data stolen.”
One way to make certain that what’s important remains under house arrest is to isolate tasks based on their priorities.
“Components that are critical to what the business does as a core competency should be kept separate from the cloud-based services,” said Doug Smith, CIO of Digital Bridge. “They may be deployed using other cloud-based hosting services, but you should make sure that these components are in your control since these are used and adapted to meet market demand.”
