From TM Forum Excellence Awards 2010:
"Cloud Service Broker
BT’s Cloud Service Broker (CSB) is the first system to address the
complex barriers to cloud adoption and enable enterprises to realize
the full potential of cloud. The CSB uses knowledge of the customer’s
specific needs with respect to application performance, costs,
security, location, ethical standards, and other criteria, and matches
them to the capabilities of cloud service providers.
The CSB creates and deploys the appropriate service within the
cloud, subsequently ensuring, minute-by-minute, that the constituent
cloud services work together continually to meet the customer’s
required SLAs. In this way, the CSB removes barriers to adoption.
While CIOs talk about the cloud, hard questions emerge such
as, “How can I be sure cloud suppliers will meet our security
requirements, application performance requirements, and ethical
standards?”, “How do I prevent runaway costs?”, “How can I govern
across multiple composite services from different providers?”, and
“Where are the standards to ease inter-working and prevent supplier
lock-in?” The CSB addresses these risks by acting as a trusted party
to set up, deliver, and manage cloud services according to particular
needs, backed up by an SLA. The innovation in this program is
threefold:
- In the business model, tackling the unanswered questions in cloud
computing with a solution that is entirely new to the marketplace;
- In standards, by providing a capability that can help promote and
develop the Forum’s standards and activities in cloud and showing
how existing Forum standards can be leveraged for cloud;
- In technology, by incorporating the latest commercial cloud
offerings from BT and collaborators in the solutions demonstrated,
and showing technically how a CSB can be delivered..."
El Jobs-To-Be-Done en este caso es clásico: ayudar al mercado a comprar un producto-servicio cuya complejidad y novedad hacen de su evaluación de cara a la decisión una tarea titánica; sin el aporte del broker la adopción del producto-servicio se retarda, o no se da nunca, no obstante el valor implícito en la oferta y el deseo del mercado de obtener provecho del mismo. ¡Muy bien el equipo de innovación en BT! Es importante que no olviden eso sí (pero esto seguro ya lo saben, sólo lo decimos para nuestros lectores), que un broker, por definición, debe ser independiente de "fabricantes-proveedores", para que el mercado crea y atienda sus recomendaciones :-)
