The Promise of Cloud Provisioning

Today's economic landscape is characterized by extreme competition, demanding customers, commoditization of products and services and pressure to cut costs. There is an increasing pressure on every organization to do more with less.

In such a demanding and competitive environment, an organization's success depends on its ability to achieve efficiencies through effective management of its business processes. The market share and competitive leadership of the organization depends on the continuous improvements and optimization of its processes. Agility and operational performance are the need of the hour for today's businesses.

In this context, "cloud provisioning," and "business activity monitoring (BAM)" enables an organization to become a cloud service provider (CSP). It allows them to offer value-added services based on their existing capabilities in the form of an application. This allows a cloud service provider to offer new services themselves or via their ISV channel.

Cloud Challenges

According to the TM Forum (a leading industry association serving the information, communications and entertainment industries) the big barriers to operate a successful cloud are:

• High operational costs
• High churn
• Low service innovation

Currently, service providers have high operating costs because they lack process automation and end-to-end process ownership. The main reason is that the current application landscape consists of disjointed and inadequate systems that are not properly integrated.

Cloud provisioning is a workflow-enabled framework, which allows you to create, automatically provision and orchestrate "virtual bundles" of on-premise and cloud-based capabilities that make up a new product, value-added service or application, despite that these capabilities come from many providers.

High churn is caused by poor customer service since the current "stovepipe" systems and inaccurate customer information does not provide the service provider with the right information at the right time.

Low service innovation is the result of several issues encountered by service providers. These include:

• Long product launch cycles because of inflexible and disjointed business processes;
• Fragmented and departmental silos that do not cooperate efficiently; and
• "Hardwired" and inflexible systems.

Business Case

A workflow-enabled provisioning framework facilitates end-to-end process integration and self-service. This creates the option for the service provider to act only on exceptions and thus lower its operating costs. In addition to cloud provisioning, business activity monitoring (BAM) measures processes and enables the service provider to increase the quality of service that, in turn, leads to increased customer satisfaction and reduced churn.

The key is to increase the service innovation through a cloud based-application development platform that enables any organization to become an independent software vendor (ISV). They can then develop and sell "mashup applications" (MashApps) through a marketplace.

Also available to ISVs for more complex applications are business operations platforms that help ISVs quickly create new services.

No cloud is successful without a sound partner program. Partners (ISVs and sales channels) which are expected to be able to create a self-containing and growing ecosystem require support. ISVs can use tools available on the market today to quickly create new applications and provide an efficient development environment for building complex applications. 

Provisioning services. Cloud provisioning caters to provisioning needs by making applications available to tenants and users, also called application subscriptions. (This is possible for both OpenText Cordys and non-OpenText Cordys applications.) With provisioning, a user is able to log in and use the application with the proper authorization. 

Informational services. Cloud provisioning provisions application subscriptions and stores the state of those subscriptions in its inventory. Therefore, cloud provisioning also acts as a source of information and knows the current state of a subscription where applicable. It offers user interfaces (UIs) and application programming interfaces (APIs) to view this information. 

Business services. When operating a cloud, it is essential to use a framework that helps service providers quickly introduce new applications and make them available to tenants and users. Support for multiple sales channels is the key to drive and grow the ecosystem. Sales channels have their own administration dashboards where they can see their subset of tenants and provide support to customers. Also, each channel will have its own catalog of applications for its line of business. 

Metering services. This cloud of computing resources will not only affect the number of data centers and the number of people employed in them, it will have profound implications for the organization. On one level the cloud will be a huge collection of electronic services based on standards. Many Web-based services are built to be integrated into existing business processes.

The Provisioning Process

Provisioning is a complex process that is best described using an example:

A new tenant visits the website and selects an application from the catalog. After payment, the catalog system sends a provisioning request to cloud provisioning using a Web service.

Based on the information in this request, the following objects are stored:

• An order
• A tenant and address
• An organization (workspace)
• One or more tenant agreements
• A user
• One or more user subscriptions
• Per user subscriptions, the roles that are assigned to the user.

Subscription flows run in the newly created organization to execute activities related to the provisioning of the application, like installing user data.

When a non-OpenText Cordys application is provisioned, the subscription flows run in cloud provisioning and use external services to provision the application.

A robust cloud provisioning engine can deal with all kinds of problems that might occur during provisioning, such as network failures. Cloud provisioning offers a provisioning engine monitor that has the capabilities to redo or skip activities, in case of errors.

An application is a "virtual bundle" of on-premise and cloud-based capabilities that make up a new product or value-added service. After testing and acceptance, an application is moved to the production environment. Before tenants start using the application, the application must be registered in with the following information:

• The information about the application (e.g. description, name of the vendor, version).
• The roles to which users can subscribe. For example, application administrator, developer, normal user and power user.
• User interfaces (UIs) can be used during the subscription process to enter information needed for the subscription process.
• Application-specific properties that the ISV can use during the subscription and also during the usage of the application.

With this information in the cloud provisioning inventory, tenants can request a subscription to this application. The application information is now available for provisioning. However, the application must also be physically available on the system where the tenant can start using it. To make the application available:

• The platform administrator must install the application on the target system
• After the application is installed, the platform administrator must update the cloud provisioning inventory to indicate that the application is available on the system. Provisioning will wait until the application is deployed.

If a user subscribes to an application and requests for a given role, then the user's account in his organization (the organizational user) will get a reference to the role in the application.

Provisioning flows and UIs, called during the actual provisioning and execute activities needed to make the application available, can also be specified in this process.

Delegation of Authority or Self-Service

Cloud provisioning provides self-service capabilities to end users, tenant administrators and SaaS providers to lower the burden of operating a cloud for the PaaS provider.

Also, the tenant administrator can provide self-service to their users, so end users can request access for a certain application. The request is processed after approval by the tenant adminstrator.