Debra Osswald is IBM’s global communications industry strategy leader. She spends a majority of her strategy cycles on the Cloud. And based on the results IBM has seen from its own internal cloud initiative, she is convinced the opportunity for communications service providers is significant and imminent. Osswald will be delivering a keynote address at the upcoming Billing & OSS World Conference & Expo in Washington DC this June 9-11 where she will provide her perspective on the ways CSPs can leverage that opportunity and, more important, monetize it.
Here, she spoke with B/OSS editor Tim McElligott about how this opportunity for CSPs is two-fold: as both adopters and providers of cloud services.
What is IBM’s cloud strategy?
Our approach is two pronged. We focus on both private and public cloud opportunities. We are an enabler of technology and business value for clients in the enterprise market and beyond. Under the auspices of our Smarter Planet strategy, we enable enterprises to leverage the cloud so they can operate smarter and more cost effectively and build an infrastructure that has the flexibility and resiliency they will need moving forward.
We also focus on service enablement. We are looking at the public cloud and building up IBM’s own capabilities to offer more services to a broader audience, those looking for the lowest possible risk and the most rapid time-to-market for whatever business services they need.
Is either prong further along?
Probably the private enablement piece is further along. Data center enablement is something we have done a long time and we take a lot of the same approach toward extending it beyond IT to the whole fabric of the organization. We have used the cloud internally to prove out the value of cloud for ourselves. There’s some $4 billion IBM has saved within our own enterprise. We saved $2.5 million per year in a technology adoption program putting a large population of our research group on the cloud—3,000 researchers across eight countries.
When it comes to selling cloud services, should the term “cloud computing” ever make it into the lexicon like DSL did?
That irked me to no end when service providers sold services that way, calling it DSL. I do not in any way think the term “cloud computing” should ever make it to consumers of the services. They don’t need to hear the techno-speak.
However, our customers are not consumers. They are sophisticated enterprise users who would get the term. However, we still focus on what we can do for the business, not the terminology. We talk about service enablement, the portfolio, the pay-as-you go business model, etc. There are so many opportunities to talk about the benefits of cloud that you don’t need to get caught up in what you call it.
