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Trends Watch

Jamcracker's Cloud Services

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Sere we would be talking about a service provider that does not provide any

cloud service of its own, but acts as a broker and let's you procure the cloud

services of others from a single roof. With a sudden burst of cloud services,

cloud service providers are providing almost everything as a service from mail

to security. Now due to this spurt in services and ad hoc adoption, many

organizations are increasingly facing difficulty in managing cloud services from

different vendors. Add management issues related to private clouds, and an IT

manager has a huge problem on hand. To address this issue, Jamcracker comes to

party. It provides an abstraction layer on top of all the cloud services of your

organization (both private and public), and gives a user single interface

through which all the existing cloud services can be managed. Jamcracker's

unified services delivery and management architecture aggregates order

management, security and policy management, user and service administration,

billing and settlement, usage reporting and auditing, and license management

across internally and externally hosted cloud services. Besides these,

infrastructure, security, data backup, messaging, collaboration, mobility and

business productivity solutions from leading vendors are available through

Jamcracker service delivery network (JSDN), which means with a few clicks, one

can get the required service. This platform was built to accommodate cloud

providers, service providers and enterprises. A service provider can bundle

their services with JSDN for quick delivery while enterprises can manage life

cycle of a cloud service plus enforce polices across private and public clouds.

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K B Chandrasekhar, Chairman and CEO, Jamcracker

We had an interesting chat with the Chairman and CEO of

Jamcracker, K B Chandrasekhar on the whole concept of cloud computing. He

illustrated it with some very interesting examples. He stated that any IT

infrastructure today has become extremely difficult to manage, with so many

silos of information, software, storage, and other resources. Everything is

scattered, so introducing a new service, or using any of the services is a

task in itself.

On the other hand, when you use the services offered by

a telecom service provider for instance-Voice calls, Voice mail, Caller

Tunes, VAS, SMS, GPRS, etc, you get everything in one place as a single

bouquet of services. You don't differentiate them as coming from multiple

sources. As far as you, the user is concerned, all those services are

provided to you by a single telecom service provider. Even your monthly bill

consolidates the cost of all these services, so you pay also in one place.

At the back-end also, the telecom service provider is

also running an overall platform, typically known as the OSS/BSS, which

offers its users seamless services. How the service provider shares its

revenues with its partners at the back-end is none of the users' concern.

Unfortunately, the way IT infrastructure is managed in

organizations is exactly the opposite. Everything is scattered all over the

place. You have to purchase different software and services from different

vendors. They have to be implemented separately as well. The trend in cloud

computing is to change all that, and provide a seamless experience to both

the user and the implementer of those services.

Unfortunately, here again, there are multiple cloud

computing service providers, each offering a different set of services. So

the user has to once again run all over the place, and deal with multiple

cloud service providers for his requirements. If the user could get all

cloud services under one roof, and buy them just as if he/she were buying an

ordinary commodity online with a credit card, then that would truly make the

difference. What's required is an integration of various cloud services, so

that you simply add the ones you like to the shopping card and pay for them

as you use them. This could truly increase the adoption of cloud computing,

and it's also the model around which Chandra's company, Jamcracker

functions.

Anil Chopra with inputs from K B Chandrasekhar of

Jamcracker

Based on inputs from K B Chandrasekhar, Chairman and

CEO, Jamcracker

On usage front, Jamcracker is quite simple and straight forward to use.

Simply login to the Service Management Console (SMC) through which a user can do

one of the following tasks: access subscribed services, manage subscription,

provision users, and get new services. This interface also includes

customization according to preference for enhanced efficiency: options like bulk

upload of users and visibility of help desk cases are a couple of neat features.

Other noticeable feature is the simplicity to subscribe for a new service; just

go to 'Marketplace' tab which lists most of the leading cloud services, click on

'Service Options' button to get license fee and 'Add to Cart'. One more

interesting part for higher management is comprehensive reporting (click on

'Report' tab and select type of report). Overall, a simple yet customizable

interface with all the required features to manage cloud services for your

organization.

 Interface of Jamcracker SMC , this can be used to

manage existing users and services

Bottomline: With Cloud services on the rise, this

tool serves future needs by providing an innovative platform that abstracts

cloud computing complexity.

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