Cloud applications broking with NervoGrid

Many years ago during the days of the precursor to the cloud – Service Oriented Architectures – one of the buzz words being bandied about was `disintermediation’, the fact that trading online meant that manufacturers could sell direct to end users and remove the `intermediate’ stage of the retailer.

As history shows, however, this never really flew as a business model. Indeed, there are signs now that the cloud is prompting a `re-intermediation’. Businesses are emerging that are effectively sales agents for cloud-enabled applications.

Such businesses are also starting to fall into two camps: the cloud brokers that buy and sell applications, and service aggregators that add value by providing services or at least the products, expertise and support with which end users can build services. Indeed, as the recently announced US-based partnership between Nixu Software and Nervogrid shows, one of the primary customers of the brokers may well be the service aggregators.

As the result of this initiative, service providers who have signed up with Nervogrid can now resell Nixu’s virtualised networking products to their customers on a pay-as-you-go basis. Nervogrid sees this as allowing service providers to become cloud application providers almost overnight,  and the Cloud Services Brokerage model as a new distribution channel designed to change the way small and mid-sized businesses buy and consume all aspects of IT.

It sees that model aims creating a marketplace where service providers can handpick the most appropriate cloud services and applications that fit the requirements of their business customers. This is the role that service aggregators will come to dominate.

They can then utilise the NervoGrid Cloud Control Panel as-a-Service to customise and manage it all.

The other potential advantage of such a business model – as well as one of its restrictions – is that there needs to be a good deal of standardisation and commonality amongst both the applications available and the target service providers in order for the service to work well and without recourse to re-engineering. In the case of NervoGrid, this comes from the fact that it is predominently a Microsoft shop reselling applications that utilise core Microsoft products.

“I firmly believe that an average company should be able to buy all the IT and network connectivity it needs like any other utility, regardless of whether we are talking about infrastructure or applications,” said Juha Holkkola, managing director of Nixu Software. “Nervogrid’s Cloud Services Brokerage platform is a solid avenue to realise this vision because in addition to bringing cloud providers and application vendors under the same roof, they have a strong service provider channel enabling a one-stop-shop for business customers.