The role of the cloud broker is slowly becoming more defined and with the growth of the Cloud will take on a number of nuances, according to some industry experts.

Meanwhile, others are warning end users that this exact situation means that maturity in the ‘cloud broker’ market is still some way off.

Cordys offers an integrated platform covering business process management (BPM), service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud that is currently being used by the new breed of consultants, offering services under the term of ‘cloud brokerage’.

Cordy’s product director Matt Davies said at the moment this new market is largely dominated by consultancies such as CapGemini and telecommunications players such as KPN in Holland, which have infrastructure to pin service offerings to.

But new players will soon enter the mix, including colocation players and other companies with access to networks of peered technologies.

“The interpretation of what a cloud broker is still something that is hard to write down succinctly on a piece of paper,” Davies said.

“But what we are seeing is that to provide cloud brokering services, the company needs to sit at an intersection of three points : the infrastructure, the software – sourced on or off premise for the cloud -and consulting.”

“CapGemini, for example, is already brokering on behalf of clients such as Royal Mail (in the UK) and Philips Health Care, using some of its own facilities and those of data center partners, basing solutions on its own competence in the number of applications it knows and knowledge on how to best use these,” Davies said.

And while it may cost a company more for a service to go through a cloud broker, Cordys’ UK MD Richard Helliar said clients are often won over by the value add of having some of the complex decisions removed from a cloud migration.

“It is about how you can package products and offer service and create different ways for a customer to consume these,” Helliar said.

Savvis’ new VP and GM of cloud services, who moved over from a role at Amazon just this year, said while he can see the desire for companies to explore the concept of a cloud broker, especially when dealing with choices surrounding different workloads, he said he believes the model is still not mature enough for a large colocation provider to follow.

“I haven’t made any effort in that direction.” Patton said. “I don’t think that model is mature yet for a variety of reasons.

“Some clouds are Storage Area Network, some are VMware, some are on different hypervisors, so it is not easy to pull it all off,” Patton said.

If you have three cloud providers out there that are image based and the APIs are all relatively consistent, you could pull it off, but at this point in the industry I think it might be challenging to do so.”

Despite this, Herrier said he believes the cloud broker will come into its own this year, with brokers even sitting inside companies with private clouds, distributing services to end users.

“If you can combine all the elements effectively, it will be a great way of delivering better IT,” Helliar said.

You can see more on new models dealing with the Cloud in an article from December 2011 looking at the shift in outsourcing contracts here.
We will also hve more on the cloud broker in FOCUS 20, out in MArch, to sign up for your copy, click here.