Cloud Convergence Council

IT vendors CA Technologies, Catalyst Telecom,
The Cloud Convergence Council has been set up by Channel Partners which describes itself as "the leader in providing news and analysis to indirect sales channels serving the communications industry. It is the unrivaled resource for resellers, aggregators, agents, brokers, VARs, systems integrators, interconnects and dealers that provide network-based communications and computing services, associated CPE and applications as well as managed and professional services" and The 2112 Group "an independent consultancy specializing in technology and channel communications and intelligence services. The 2112 Group was founded on the principle of community collaboration and "crowdsourcing" solutions to complex business and technology problems."

Their blog asserts;

What is for certain is that everyone is moving toward a cloud delivery model, further blurring the lines between the Telecom and IT worlds – the vendors and their channels. I am not suggesting the cloud will create homogeneity among channel partners – differentiation is a key – but their sandboxes certainly are less discrete.

With this in mind[the Council assembles] thought leaders from the Telecom and IT industries – both vendors and their partners – to address some of the big questions around evolving business models to narrow questions around reconciling terminology.

This is really just a conference event and the "sponsors" (CA Technologies, Juniper Networks, PGi, Catalyst Telecom and Motorola Solutions) are really just that - people paying for advertising rights.

Juniper did have a slightly different spin;

The Cloud Convergence Council is a newly-formed community of telecom and IT vendors and their channel partners coming together to deliberate the issues and opportunities that come with the convergence of the two channels in the cloud. The inaugural council will be introduced and share its initial work and goals in a roundtable discussion at the conference.

They were the only sponsor that seems to have leveraged the "news" opportunity.

So what is this about? Well, its a convergence story because no one is sure whether the cloud is an IT or a Telecoms sale. Its just if you do go to the cloud you need more and better comms and you need to buy a service from someone.

But what's still missing is a batter handle on what the "cloud" is. Some people emphasise the cloud as a processing space - but that seems about as dumb as ditching your LAN to install an old IBM SNA network with dumb terminals. Others think that its all about secure storage.

Like so very much of the 21st Century the cloud is probably best defined as "collaborative". It obviously supports collaboration across teams and worksites. But it also really is about collaboration between local processing and storage and remote processing and storage.

But that won't come out of the Cloud Convergence Council - they just want to work out "channel" arrangements to flog it!


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