The Cloud, SOA and Cable: CIO.IT Competition - Session 1
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This document discusses how telecommunications providers can become cloud service brokers to SMB customers. It notes that while public cloud offerings have become commoditized, SMB customers still have complex needs. The document proposes that providers can simplify SMB access to cloud services by bundling popular SaaS applications with their network services through a single user portal. This would allow providers to differentiate themselves, drive new revenue through subscriptions, and reduce churn by becoming a trusted cloud advisor to SMBs. The document outlines elements needed like a self-service SMB portal and rapid onboarding of SaaS vendors. It argues this could extend provider value beyond connectivity and help boost ARPU/AMPU through new cloud services for SMBs.
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The Cloud, SOA and Cable: CIO.IT Competition - Session 1
- 1. The Cloud, SOA and Cable: CIO.IT Competition - Session 1 Brian Cappellani Sigma Systems
- 2. Geoff Moore – Escape Velocity Complex Systems vs. Volume Operations Sweet Sweet Spot Spot Effectiveness Complex Volume Systems Operations 100 101 102 106 107 108 Number of Customers Complexity Volume Government Small Societal Enterprise Consumer Programs Business Entitlements
- 3. New Cloud Offerings - Bridging Complexity Market Complexity Cloud Complexity ROI ARPU/AMPU Churn Time to Market Market / Customers are Complex Possible Cloud Offerings are Complex • Ala Carte vs. standard offerings • Infrastructure driven to commodity • Vertical vs. general solutions • Platform as a service fragmented • Consumer vs. SMB vs. Enterprise • Software as a service lacking channel
- 4. Focus & Simplify Forrester Research: Public Cloud Forecast 2011 to 2020 TM Forum Survey: October 2011 SaaS SMB
- 5. SMB Relationship Transformed Become the Trusted Advisor Specific opportunity to channel SaaS with scale and trust to SMB – focus on key SaaS applications where quality of service and connectivity SLA creates differentiation Provider of Pipes Cloud Service Broker • Provider adds value to cloud applications – Trusted supplier to the SMB – Cloud applications bundled with on-network services – Creating channels to SMBs that SaaS vendors cannot reach – Single SMB user experience across many cloud applications • Ordering • Provisioning • Billing • Support
- 6. Elements Necessary • Self-service In a scalable, • Experience closer to Facebook than MS SMB Admin / End User System Center repeatable, and Portal • Manage Subscriptions economic • Manage users across on-network and SaaS manner services • Allows CSR to perform all actions available in the self-service portal Backoffice Provisioning / • Enter and orchestrate orders with existing Order Mgmt back office systems, on-network services and SaaS services • Provisioning APIs implemented in days / weeks rather than months Rapid SaaS Vendor • Jump start program for branding, pricing, and Onboarding business relationship • Built on industry standards
- 7. Sigma Systems Enabled Providers • On-prem or as a PaaS hosted by Sigma • Integrated into your billing, support, assurance and identity systems • Catalog of name-brand SaaS apps with strong network affinity and value to the SMB • Single experience across on-network and off-network / brokered services
- 8. Cloud Service Brokerage from Sigma Value added services for businesses that extend value beyond high-speed data & hosted voice – reducing churn, driving ARPU/AMPU, quickly to market 24 May 2012 Confidential - Sigma Systems Chart - 8
- 9. Q&A 9
Editor's Notes
- Thank you. My name is Brian Cappellani, and I am the CTO of Sigma Systems. You may be familiar with Sigma from our provisioning, mediation and device management solutions in the cable space. Today, I am going to talk to you about Cloud Service Brokerage and how this concept can enable cable operators to improve their ability to serve and generate revenue in the Small to Medium Business space, simply and effectively.But before I start, I would like to talk a bit about complexity and simplicity. Geoffrey Moore, author of such books as Crossing the Chasm and Dealing with Darwin, covers a number of fresh topics in his latest book Escape Velocity. In his latest writing, Moore spends some time talking about complex business systems versus volume based business operations.
- What we see here in this diagram are two flavors of solutions that are typically brought to market. One focused on the sweet spot that is rich in complexity and depth, but limited in the size of the market. Like solutions that would service the large enterprise commercial market.The second is focused on a more restricted feature set, with simplicity, but has its sweet spot centered on volume and has an enormous market size. Like the residential spaceMoore’s position is that if you can bridge these two sweet spots simply, your organization is able to be truly disruptive in the market and gain dominance over your competitors. You will see that we think that the SMB market represents that type of scenario. But first let’s look at the two environments of commercial services and cloud
- We have heard in many of the sessions here that operators are looking to generate growth and revenue in the commercial space. We have also heard a lot about “the cloud” and cloud services.If we apply some of Geoff’s general thoughts to the specific problem of service providers bringing cloud offerings to market we can see the complexity in the commercial market and the complexity of the cloud space. For operators attempting to serve the commercial space, the market needs are much different than residential, and much more complex. You have the need to get to market quickly, and you have to manage your investment profile. On the other hand, for companies now trying use cloud applications, their environment is complex – IaaS, PaaS, SaaS; They have heard a lot about these products, and they want to take advantage of business benefits, but they have challenges : they need to find and understand what are the best solutions in the marketplace, they need to trust that the cloud companies are reputable, and if they are using multiple SaaS providers they have to be able to manage the billing and operational relationship of all these separate companies. And the complexity becomes more acute as you get to smaller customers- the SMB space.A solution that succeeds in bridging this complexity to find the sweet spot of these two needs meets Geoff’s target of maximizing business benefit.
- In Sigma’s view in the bridging between those two sets of challenges provides the “sweet spot” of operators delivering SaaS applications to the SMB market.Here we are talking about businesses with around 20 or so employees or less – that don’t have their own IT department.And we think this is based on two things Geoff talks about : focus and simplification.This opportunity is good because this segment is already a focus for many operators, and as an operator, you are able to leverage many of your strengths around volume and repeatable delivery, and there is a true opportunity to remove a lot of the complexity around SaaS for the SMBs. And that simplification is important. As we have already seen, it is a challenge for SMBs to understand and leverage the world of SaaS, and are looking for help.
- For operators that are already addressing the SMB segment, you have at minimum become a provider of pipes – but hopefully you have become a trusted advisor to these SMBs around their communication services – how they can make the complex simple, by using your “pipes” to make their business more profitable.You now have the opportunity to leverage that that trusted advisor role to allow them to harness the power of the cloud and SaaS services and to build upon your communications services and improve their overall productivity while adding more ARPU to your top line. And that is what Cloud brokerage is – it allows you to quickly and easily add these types of SaaS applications to your offer. And we think that there are many SaaS applications that can make your current communications services even more sticky – from dynamic bandwidth management integrated to cloud backup, to even incoming call integration to cloud CRM – you can provide solutions that deliver the best of both your “on-network” and now “off-network” cloud solutions.At the same time, SaaS vendors in general have not been effective in reaching down market to the SMBs. The are SaaS vendors that are excited to have service providers as a channel and are compensating the service providers accordingly. You now don’t have to look at the SaaS provider as riding over the top of your pipes, you have the ability to make those SaaS services part of your offer, and leverage the investment you have put into those pipes.You can provide the SMB with a catalog of SaaS services that they know that they can trust, that they know that will add value to the current services they have with you.But to truly leverage that trusted advisor role, you need to be able to make it simple for the SMB.Simple to order the cloud services, simple for them to get provisioned immediately, simple to see their costs on a single bill, simple for them to manage the services for their employees. Because as we said, there is no IT department here for the SMB – it is probably the owner, who is already pretty stressed from their day to day business operations.
- But what are some of the elements you need to bring in order to create that simplicity ?You need self-service – web based portals that allow the SMB to manage their own services. But this needs to be an experience closer to facebook than to IT administration tools.Where an administrator can manage their SaaS subscriptions and users in their company; And single sign on here is important – the ability to seamlessly integrate this portal into your current portals, as well as the automatically pop the correct screens from the SaaS provider – eliminating the need for the SMB admin to have to remember all the different sites and logins for all the different SaaS providers they have signed up with – you take all that complexity away.And minimizing that complexity includes the ability to integrate into your existing systems for billing and ordering. While there are solutions coming to the market dealing with this cloud capability that are relatively standalone – without that integration to your backoffice, you the operator don’t have the ability to address this market in a cost efficient manner.And the offers and services that you can take to market are growing and evolving rapidly. You want to harness the innovation in the SaaS marketplace to rapidly onboard new SaaS vendors – but you need to have the capability to bring vendors on rapidly – in days/weeks, not months
- And that is where our product comes in – Cloud service brokerage from Sigma leverages our rich experience in on-net service management with cable operators, while providing a whole new set of capabilities to deliver SaaS services to the marketplace.To help ease your implementation and manage your initial Capex investment – this solution is offered either hosted by us, or can be installed in the operators premisesIn our solution, we bring the ability to provide a catalog of name-branded SaaS apps, like Google apps and Mozy, that have strong affinity to the communications services you provide, while adding value to the SMB. And with that comes the frameworks and capabilities to rapidly add new services as your offers and the marketplace unfoldsAnd we are able to leverage our experience with cable operators back offices to provide these with integration to your billing, support, assurance and identity systems.And we provide a set of very innovative user portals and user experience for both the administrator and employees across both your on-network services and the cloud brokered services – allowing you the ability to provide your SMB customers a simple, single place to go to manage all of the services that you offer – seamlessly integrated to both your environments and those of your SaaS partners.We are demonstrating this capability at our booth here at the show, so I encourage you to check it out.
- Investing the time to develop a cloud service brokerage solution that delivers name-brand SaaS applications with strong business value to SMBs clearly can drive significant financial rewards, aligning well with Geoff Moore’s thoughts. By taking complexity out of the SaaS market and delivering a simple experience to the over worked and stressed SMB owners and employees, service providers can focus on driving down churn, driving ARPU/AMPU up, and dominate the SMB markets they serve.