By Mark Everett Hall
The creation of the Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council (ECBC), today at Management World Americas, will create an ecosystem of buyers and sellers to eliminate the barriers large organizations face when they consider adopting the technology.
Despite a couple of years of sustained hype around cloud computing, enterprise adoption of these Internet-based services has been slowed by an array of issues, said Keith Willetts, chairman and CEO of TM Forum.
The goal of the ECBC is to identify business and technical issues that impede enterprise buyers from using cloud services. According to Willetts, those issues include security, network latency, data portability among cloud providers, transparency of vendor offerings, service-level agreements and standardization.
He said the ECBC will bring both sides of the business equation together to solve those problems so that the technology will experience wider and faster adoption by large organizations.
“We want to look over the horizon to the point where there are real implementations running 24/7 with five 9s availability,” he said.
Jim Warner, Vice President & Head of Digital Media, Advertising & Cloud Computing programs at TM Forum, said that TM Forum will work with other organizations that are defining standards for cloud services.
“We have no desire to recreate the wheel,” he said. “We don’t want to produce competing standards, which would be worse for the market.”
However, Willetts added that unlike most nascent groups seeking standards for cloud services, what makes the ECBC unique today is the emphasis on enterprise buyers.
“Everything builds off the buyer,” he said.
Eric Pulier, CEO of ServiceMesh, who helped spearhead the ECBC, agreed.
“Absent an organization of buyers, the sellers are really guessing” about what the market needs, he said.
Two large multinational financial institutions, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Deutsche Bank, are among the founding members of the ECBC. Both companies already have rolled out large-scale cloud computing operations.
The ECBC is open to all TM Forum members.
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