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Sadly, I am no longer employed by IBM, so this blog which started as a team blog for the IBM Business Partner Technical Strategy Enablement (IBPTSE) Telecom team no longer represents IBM in any shape or form. As I became the Chief Telecom Architect for IBM for the WebSphere brand worldwide, I continued to write posts. The WebSphere brand merged into the new Cloud brand in 2015 and I retained the same role working with Telcos all around the world to design software solutions to solve their business problems. Now as an independent Telecom architect, my hope is to continue/resurrect this blog on Telecom business issues and technology.
She also made the interesting point that (in her opinion) we are too early in the cloud evolution to actually define standards. She believes that any standards set now would stifle innovation in cloud technology and interoperability. I was interested to hear about this since I attended a web conference call a few weeks ago run by the TeleManagement Forum's effort to create standards around clouds, particularly For Enterprise use rather than public clouds. I guess the Enterprise cloud market is the most likely type of cloud user that will need interoperability first, thus the emphasis on standards.
Amy co-presented with John Falkl from IBM who discussed BPM within the cloud. Given BPM is a business function, items subjects such as Security are usually one of the biggest hurdles for Cloud Services. There are multiple factors that fall under the title of 'security' such as encryption, roles, authentication (especially when using federates or external authentication services), legal data protection requirements and authorisations. John also pointed out a number of considerations that should be considered in enterprise cloud services including Governance models (which he sees as an extension to normal enterprise governance models). John's view of standards for Cloud services is that it will most likely start with Web Services standards such as WS-Provisioning and mentioned that there were multiple efforts around cloud standards. I might see if I can have a chat to both John and Amy after the session to get their views on the TMF's efforts around cloud standards. If that discussion is interesting, I will report back.Amy made a really interesting point during the Q&A - she said that when she was at Microsoft a few weeks ago and asked about transactional activity in their cloud - they said that MS could not do it.... Very interesting especially when you consider that transactional integrity is a core capability on IBM's cloud capability.
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I asked Amy about the TMF Cloud standardisation - she hadn't heard about it, but did say that she thought that TMF's approach was right - asking the enterprise customers to specify their requirements - she also thought they were probably the right place to start for any cloud standards too.
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#ibmimpact
Orange in France are using WebSphere sMash to provide an easy development environment using PHP and Groovy to build Telco enabled applications that consume Orange Application Programming Interface (API) which are exposed through pre-built widgets. The custom Orange API is not compliant with either OneAPI or ParlayX and I would normally not endorse a custom API like this, but time to market forces meant that Orange had to move before the (OneAPI) standards were in place. What I would take from their experience in France is their model and use cases. All of which could be done and (now) use standards for those APIs. Interestingly, I think that Orange could also use IBM Mashup Center to support developers with even less skills that the PHP and Groovy developers they're currently targeting.
