The Global Cloud Services Brokerage market is expected to grow at respectable rate over the next few years.  And one of the key factors contributing to this market growth is the increasing issues in vendor management.  The Global Cloud Services Brokerage market has also been witnessing the emergence of interoperability standards.

It's been a while since VMblog last spoke with Jamcracker, one of the market leaders in this space.  To find out more and to see what the company has been up to since that last conversation, I again spoke with Steve Crawford, vice president of marketing and business development at Jamcracker. 

VMblog:  We last talked with Jamcracker in June of 2011.  So what's the latest with the company?

Steve Crawford: It's an opportune time to be in the Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB) enablement space, which is exciting for Jamcracker. The market is expanding at a rapid pace, and we are constantly bringing on new customers and partners. We've expanded our customer base to include more telcos, three of the top five IT distributors, several large enterprises, and there are many more impressive developments in the pipeline, including some very large state and federal government opportunities.

Most notably, we're now seeing a groundswell of interest from large enterprise and government IT organizations interested in learning about how they can become Internal CSBs - in other words, where the IT department is aggregating the delivery and life-cycle management of public and private SaaS and IaaS cloud services for their internal users. Recently, Jamcracker began offering a Cloud AppStore Pilot Program for Enterprise and Government IT organizations. This Pilot Program provides participants with access to their own Cloud AppStore that is prepopulated with a catalog of public cloud service providers. This program will provide users with first-hand experience for best practices in implementing and managing an internal CSB for their organization. The Pilot Program also includes consultative training and CSB Administrator guides. We are enthusiastic about this new program as we are eager to educate IT organizations who are interested in providing Enterprise Cloud AppStores for their user communities.

VMblog:  Can you refresh the memories of VMBlog readers and explain what a Cloud Service Broker (CSB) model is?

Crawford: An analogy we sometimes use is that of a supermarket. People used to go to the butcher for meat, the bakery for bread, a fruit stand for fruit and so on and so forth. As any market matures, aggregators begin to emerge. In the case of the food suppliers, supermarkets entered the market to provide consumers with one centralized place to obtain groceries. In the case of cloud computing, CSBs entered the market to provide a single place for businesses of all sizes to access, consume and manage cloud services from different providers.

Gartner defines a CSB as an entity that will "play an intermediary role in cloud computing... [to] make it easier for organizations to consume and maintain cloud services, particularly when they span multiple providers." CSBs broker relationships between cloud services consumers and multiple cloud providers, aggregating many services into one place with a single point of catalog management, user administration, access control and security, billing, auditing and reporting, support, license management, and many other aspects. CSB operators are either Internal CSBs or External CSBs, and some will serve double duty. Internal CSBs are operated by centralized IT organizations that provide internal Cloud AppStores for employees and affiliated members. External CSBs monetize cloud services delivery by aggregating and selling from their own private-branded Cloud Marketplaces.

VMblog:  And why should a business consider becoming a CSB?

Crawford: Many in the industry agree that adopting a CSB model can be one of the most helpful tools any enterprise or SMB can adopt to better manage cloud services. CSB presents service providers, distributors, technology OEMs, and enterprise/government IT organizations with a major opportunity to improve delivery of services to their users and customers.

VMblog:  Explain if you would, how is the cloud services brokerage landscape changing?

Crawford: The market is poised for enormous growth. I would estimate that 90% of startups in Silicon Valley right now are directly or indirectly in the cloud computing space. Most of them are building cloud services on top of other cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services. This innovation on top of innovation makes it much easier and less expensive to create new cloud-based solutions - whether you are a small startup or a large enterprise. We are currently seeing the first phase of how cloud computing is going to become the fabric of IT across all industries. As this cloud-enabled innovation continues to grow exponentially, the market will continue to mature, and cloud computing will eventually become the standard IT delivery and consumption model for enterprises and SMBs. This will make the role of CSBs integral to how we run our businesses and governments. Gartner predicts that CSB will be a central focus for cloud computing in 2013 and will be a $100 billion market by 2015.

VMblog:  Can you give us an example of a successful employment of the Jamcracker CSB model?

Crawford: Of course there are many successful use cases we could discuss. A great example is Telstra, Australia's leading telecommunications and information services company. Telstra Business serves small to medium enterprises with fixed line, mobile and broadband, and data and Internet solutions tailored for business. In November of 2008, the company launched T-Suite, an online marketplace of cloud services. Jamcracker was selected to help Telstra to further monetize broadband investment through service differentiation, expand markets without expanding networks, and expand the business model for future earnings growth. Our Jamcracker Services Delivery Network (JSDN) solution provided the ability for Telstra to offer a full range of business applications as an on-demand service for a monthly subscription or usage fee. Since adopting Jamcracker's solutions, Telstra has seen enormous business benefits, including reduced customer churn and increased instances of customers adopting more services. Both of these are keen indicators of increased customer satisfaction.

KPN, on the other hand, is leveraging the Jamcracker platform to offer hosted CSB services on behalf of their mid and large enterprise customers. CSB is a natural extension of KPN's managed services offerings. With KPN's CSB, their enterprise customers get their own private Cloud AppStores from which their IT departments can provide their users with a consolidated catalog of services, single sign-on (SSO), centralized service and user management, unified policy enforcement across multiple cloud providers, and many other benefits.

VMblog:  So increased customer satisfaction sounds like a major benefit for adopting the CSB model.  What are some of the other potential benefits of adopting a CSB model?

Crawford: The potential benefits of adopting a CSB model are game changing. For service providers, they have the opportunity to drive new sources of revenue, to extend brand visibility to business end-users and differentiate core services to drive competitive displacements. IT Vendors can create partner and services ecosystems and also enable new services channels. Distributors can create subscription revenue models and increase channel loyalty and profitability. And lastly, Enterprise IT stands to benefit enormously as well by extending governance and compliance to the cloud, increasing business optimization and flexibility, and reducing overhead costs.

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Thanks again to Steve Crawford, VP of marketing and business development at Jamcracker, for taking time out to speak with VMblog.