Learning From the Cloud - Delivering a Premise Solution with Cloud Values

There has been much discussion about the cloud and the new economics of scale and delivery it introduces to the business communications market. In the cloud delivery world there are two key factors that drive success: cost/margin and customer satisfaction. Clearly managing cost through scale is critical, but more important is reducing cost through automation and world-class systems to manage delivery and associated costs. The second factor is customer satisfaction. Customer churn is a major issue in the cloud, with customer losses as high as 2% per month for communication cloud vendors.

Many of the cloud vendors have turned to Business Communications Operation Management (BCOM) solutions as a key component of their overall cloud strategy. BCOM solutions enable the cloud vendors to automate the provisioning and change process, including self-provisioning and management activities. The result is reduced cost, reduced errors, and dramatically improved customer satisfaction. For example, Marc Ossart, of NTT Communications, a major user of BCOM vendor Kurmi's solution commented, "Using BCOM is critical to meeting our goals for profitability in our cloud operations. If we were using more traditional configuration methods, our costs would explode. I think enterprises that are, in effect, operating a private cloud can learn from our experience and see that BCOM is critical to their success."

Clearly Marc is addressing a key challenge for on-premises Business Communications systems and their operating staffs. As cloud emerges as a potential option, on-premises solutions will be compared to the emerging cloud solutions for both usability and cost. In many ways, an IT team operating an internally managed business communications system needs to think of themselves as a cloud entity. While the term Private Cloud has many meanings, in this case it is highly apropos, as that is how the team needs to think about it.

Clearly, if the internally managed and delivered services are being compared to the cloud, then cost, service levels, and user friendliness are critical. BCOM solutions can be deployed by enterprises and organizations to enhance their premises solutions with cloud attributes, including: standardized offers, specialized delivery, and automation/orchestration of the operations. BCOM solutions are ideal in providing this, especially in the multivendor environments that define the state of the art in modern business communications. BCOM ties the provisioning and change management of the system to optimized business process for the organization. By integrating closely with the actual business process though BCOM, the internal organization can deliver a more tightly integrated solution for their business partners than a cloud offer.

Edouard De Fonclare, CEO of Kurmi says, "We are seeing a number of our premises deployments reflecting the technology and capabilities we developed for the cloud. We see our premises users often thinking of themselves as operating a Private Cloud Business Communications solution for their organization. This clear focus, combined with the tools we provide as part of our BCOM offering, are seen as critical to maintaining the value of these systems in the face of cloud competition."

For organizations contemplating their path forward and responding to the inevitable question of whether cloud is the right answer, deploying BCOM and moving to a Private Cloud model of delivery of Business Communications is one option that should be considered. As is clear from the world of computing and data centers, using the values of the cloud in a private implementation can deliver the results of the cloud without the risks of a full movement of all capabilities to a public cloud deployment.

This paper is sponsored by Kurmi Software.