Internal CSB Role Creates New Value for IT Org

Here in Australia at our AADI event I just hosted an “analyst user round-table” (think: analyst-facilitated IT Leader discussion) on the topic of cloud services brokerage. Was a small, passionate-about-talking-cloud group of folks — without knowing it we ran 15 minutes long on a 45 minute session and the Events staff eventually kicked us out of the room. 🙂

One “finding” (think: insight or conclusion) about CSB from one of the participants was quite interesting to me because it echoed a similar position that we’ve just recently published in Internal CSB Role Is Emerging Within IT Organizations: that assuming the CSB role — in their case in the form of integration brokerage in particular to address emerging SaaS to on-premise integration requirements — has increased the value of the IT organization to their company overall and line-of-business groups in particular that were adopting SaaS, which were ill-equipped to handle those requirements. Such new cloud skills and perceived “value” can be a big boost for IT organizations that are otherwise challenged to help their companies embrace cloud.

A few other points worth noting:

First, this particular IT group (and another attendee too) was very clear that they accepted full responsibility via the Internal CSB role for delivery of cloud services to various IT groups throughout the company. Secondly, they clearly segregated that responsibility from who was responsible for *implementation*, in this case for SaaS integration projects that they outsourced to a local system integrator. Finally, its also noteworthy that they are leveraging a US-based iPaaS provider (not identified here to avoid the appearance of promoting them) to support a combination of internal and SaaS integration projects.

The last point is noteworthy because while integration development work occurs in the cloud, this provider allows integration run-time logic to be deployed on-premise (as an alternative to running in the cloud — the customer can choose which approach best serves their needs). Turns out another participant in the AUR session was in the process of considering a similar iPaaS deployment model, though with a different provider.

These were interesting Findings, both on their own merits and in particular when you consider that cloud adoption in Australia (as I’ve been led to believe from talking to clients and vendors) is off to a bit of a modest start. But perhaps not for the good folks I met with here today in my AUR session — they were a cloud-savvy group, and I really enjoyed our lively CSB discussion!

– bjl