A new consortium of UK-based companies has formed to provide medium-sized British firms with a ready-made “sourcing pool” of cloud specialist services and products.
Dubbed the UK Cloud Alliance, the consortium is led by founding member Star, which is itself an IT and communications service provider in the UK.
The idea behind the alliance is that it is a group of 17 cloud providers who have been screened and audited, so that medium sized businesses can quickly source local specialist support to help solve their most pressing cloud challenges.
Companies that are seeking cloud expertise have traditionally had to deal with one service provider that acts as a ‘one-stop-shop’, but which in reality outsources specialist tasks and services to other third party companies.
The UK Cloud Alliance will offer potential cloud buyers more protection, as all members are pre-vetted and subject to due diligence, prior to joining the Alliance.
UK Cloud Alliance members are also not massive corporations that are solely focused on the high-end enterprise accounts, but are instead specifically aimed at mid-tier companies. Indeed, the UK Cloud Alliance prides itself on being able to offer a local cloud service provider for UK business.
“Star is a managed service provider and over the past 18 months we have seen our customer base asking for the transformal aspect of the Cloud,” said Tanner. “This often involves a degree of complexity, yet we are not an IBM or Accenture, so we were increasingly being asked to partner other organisations. This is what the CIOs were asking, so we decided to offer them a complete solution instead. We looked at 13 areas of specialisms or skills sets, and we filled that with 17 organisations, and that became the UK Cloud Alliance.”
“The UK Cloud Alliance is led by Star but no one member has overriding responsibility,” said Tanner.
The collection of the Alliance’s technology choices can be delivered via Star’s private cloud platform.
“The benefits for customers is that the UK Cloud Alliance becomes a sourcing pool, that provides better managed services from a pre-vetted organisation,” said Tanner. “This is not a trade committee but allows for savvy IT buyers to use it to get enable the cloud for their organisation. It has taken 18 months to get this Alliance to market.”
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I was interested to read Andy Burton’s comments on the new Cloud Alliance and broadly agree with his view that "if the only purpose is to serve the commercial success of that partnership, then it's not necessarily helping the end user make a [purchasing] decision."
The best interests of end users have to be at the heart of any cloud computing implementation. After all, moving to the cloud can never be a simple purchasing decision. At Bull, we prefer to see it as an evolutionary journey that will ultimately provide a greater range of choice for users.
The key is to guide each customer ‘step-by-step’ on a journey at a pace with which they are comfortable, with clearly defined outcomes at each stage along the way. The journey will ultimately help transition IT from a cost to a driver of added value for the business – but the speed that each organisation makes the move will inevitably be dependent on the complexity of their IT infrastructure and also their relative maturity as a business.
Flexibility has to be the keynote here. For most medium-sized businesses moving straight to the public cloud is likely to be a case of ‘too much, too soon.’ Typically, an initial adoption of the private cloud is likely to make more sense. This will help organisations build trust in the model and experience the reassurance that comes from knowing where their data is located, from secure access control and from the highest levels of information security governance.
This gives them the option to move seamlessly to a certified public cloud at a later date
Andrew Carr, sales and marketing director, Bull UK and Ireland