Podcast 3 - Cloud Computing

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A full transcript of this podcast is reproduced below.

Hello. My name is Neil Sutton, and I’m the vice president of Propositions and Capabilities for BT Global Services.

Today I’d like to talk to you about cloud computing and how it supports collaboration and a more effective business.

In today’s challenging time, the one thing we can be sure of is the unpredictability of the environment in which we work. And, in that context, all of the clients that I work with talk to me about how do we introduce predictability into the way service is delivered.

They talk to me about how we can get a degree of flexibility, but not lose the ability to innovate as they move forward. We also talk to them about the changing trends in the market and some of the big conversations that we’ve had with our customers recently have been very much around collaboration as a big theme.

Collaboration has been mentioned by many IT vendors in the market, as well as organisations themselves, as they look to work in a more global way, but also how they work in a more flexible way, through initiatives such as flexible working, where it requires a different working style to that that’s been previously implemented in some work groups.

The other aspect, or key trend, is cloud computing, possibly the most talked about topic in the IT industry today. We’ve gone from a broad understanding of cloud computing being this set of services that are delivered in a cloud typically referred to being the internet, to a more refined understanding of what cloud computing is. Cloud computing refers to the cloud – well we need to understand what that is, there are different clouds that are required for both enterprises or for consumers. We talk about computing, when actually we’re talking about a set of services, a set of IT services that are delivered or aggregated for a set of users to utilise.

But just look at both those subjects, collaboration and cloud computing and look at some of those attributes about why they are big trends in the market.

Firstly, cloud computing. A Key aspect for using cloud computing is especially when you want to introduce an application quickly, and also maybe only want to have it available for a short space of time, i.e. you want to launch a new customer application.

Secondly, cloud computing is highly topical when you want to use and make services available to a broad range of people, maybe across multiple organisations or countries or geographies, and they want that ubiquitous access as well as users to be able to move around and have ubiquitous access to the data and services they’ve stored.

Likewise with collaboration. We know the key to collaboration is not only about the technology and the tools but the culture; the culture being one word you’re not in control of everything, but you have a framework in which you can collaborate productively. And the tools play a part in that because you need to make collaboration easy and simple to do.

So, both trends look at flexibility and predictability; they look at time and optimising the way we work together and how services are delivered.

What does that mean? Well, it’s proved in recent studies that collaboration and flexible working and a productive way to global working is key to how business survive today and succeed through difficult times. As I said, collaboration requires a set of simple and easy tools to be able to effectively support collaboration across all organisations especially.

So cloud computing has a key role, and that key role is to be able to underpin businesses being collaborative by having a known and predictable infrastructure, that can be deployed quickly, that can be accessed through applications being loaded quickly and that can be deployed so that people can have use of their applications and services wherever they are.

And as collaboration evolves, that plays to the point about flexibility. The advantage of cloud computing based services is you can flex services up and down as you require to reflect the change in business priorities and business needs.

And let’s take a specific example where I think it lands best. That around how businesses collaborate with their customers. We see in the way customer service is delivered from enterprises, that increasingly people are delivering customer service globally. That requires you to network agents and operations, data centres as well as contact centres. And as you roll-out in new countries and make new sites available, customer service has to be available first, and it also has to be there last when you’re taking down the service or the operation as well.

So, for me customer service is the point at which collaboration, with the supporting cloud computing infrastructure, is really key, because it is the most flexible and responsive area of your business in many ways, and it’s the area, say for example, where BT global services have invested in cloud-based services to support the global operations of customer services infrastructures for our customers.

And you see those real benefits when customers can’t predict the known customer service requirement in the future and they don’t have predictability. All they know is that they can’t see it and they need to have that flexibility and to be able to work in a highly adaptive manner.

And there’s one example of how cloud-delivered services is delivering a real known platform that allows people to work in a collaborative way, in this instance with customers, to deliver a highly effective service around the world. And we see this in some of the key industries, such as the airline industry and some of the other industries which are highly global organisations, in the way they wish to seek to achieve cost savings, they seek to be able to deliver more services to customers and to do it in a more adaptive manner.

So I’ve touched on cloud and the different types, I’ve talked about collaboration and the importance of that for organisations to thrive in challenging times. I’ve talked about the need to be able to work effectively in a time critical manner and provide sets of services which are simple, easy and convenient.

The one final piece I think that is key to both cloud computing and collaboration is security. Many cloud services today, from a public sense, are non-compliant in many situations, and we have to be very clear on this. Certain pieces of information can only be stored within certain boundaries. And so we have to be very cognisant of that.

Likewise, collaboration is effective but the important thing is you know who you’re collaborating with and the basis on which you are collaborating.

So for cloud computing to be effective it needs to be linked into the business need, fully, especially in regard to security and compliance. And cloud computing can play an important role in underpinning how companies work together in a collaborative way to thrive in a challenging time.

www.globalservices.bt.com