December 8, 2009

TM Forum Creates Cloud Services Council

TM Forum has announced the formation of an ecosystem of major industry players in the emerging cloud services sector. The centerpiece of this effort is the creation of the Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council (ECBC) whose goal is to understand the needs of commercial cloud services buyers, set strategy and launch specific work programs.

Among the enterprise buyers joining this effort are Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Deutsche Bank.
 
So far Alcatel-Lucent, Amdocs, AT&T, BT, CA, Cisco, EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Nokia Siemens Networks, Telecom Italia and Telstra have agreed to join the program.


Several candidate areas for work have already been identified including:

• Common Cloud Services Product Definitions

• Cloud Security Issues
• 
Cloud-to-Cloud Interoperability, Data Portability and APIs

• Service Provider Benchmarking
• 
Buyer-demand Forecasting
• 
Federated Cloud Stores
• 
Cloud Service Level Agreement Process Management
• 
Cloud Network Performance and Latency Issues