This week I published our latest Cloud Best Practices white paper, called ‘Microsoft Cloud 2.0‘.

The main activity of the CBPN is this vendor matching, i.e. we identify the best practice model, and then describe how different vendors can be used to implement those models. In this case Cloud 2.0 mapped on to the Microsoft suite.

Cisco also have similar technologies and you can also identify the regional interpretations of the best practices too.

Canadian Cloud 2.0

In the case of Canada, the need for Cloud 2.0 was identified early on in the Shared Services Canada set up process.

The GTEC presentation given by Liseanne Forand, President of Shared Services Canada is a comprehensive overview of the why and how of the program, and in particular it makes one critical headline point: Shared Services is about a lot more than just cost savings.

In particular Liseanne identifies four primary ways that shared services will shape the future of public services:

• generating economic development,
• driving mass collaboration,
• fostering legitimacy and
• enabling front-office agility.

‘Mass collaboration’ is another description for the ‘Crowdsourcing’ aspects of Cloud 2.0, and the first point about generating economic development is also the broader goals we’re using here to set up the Canada Cloud Network.

A real challenge an organization like Shared Services Canada will have with regards to statements like this is the actual numbers of personnel they will have on staff who are skilled in a topic like ‘mass collaboration’, or given the ongoing ‘Innovation Gap’ of Canada, how many can define where this positive uplift to the economy will come from.

This is why these kinds of areas are ideal for Cloud sourcing. I.e. Focus on those areas where you don’t have the in-house skills yourself and there’s big opportunity to be found in quickly gaining access to powerful new social media type technologies. Hosting providers are ideal platforms for web site solutions as you can imagine.

Cisco Cloud 2.0

With this in mind it’s then helpful to showcase what the vendors offer.

As described in the white paper Microsoft has their suite including the recently acquired FAST Search engine, and Cisco too has a range of products.

As described on the introduction to Mike Montgomery Cisco have a range of Cloud Computing platform technologies, and they also offer social collaboration technologies too.  Here’s some good white papers on them.

These are then translated into Cloud managed services via solutions like ‘UCaaS’ – Unified Comms as a Service.

With regards to the ‘generating economic development‘ part of Lisanne’s statement, Cisco have actually got some pretty powerful thought leadership of their own.

They propose that using these social collaboration technologies throughout the various processes of innovation will engender a ‘Next Generation Cluster‘.

Let’s find out!