Is UC's Future in Hybrid Cloud?Is UC's Future in Hybrid Cloud?

Users seem interested, vendors and resellers are making moves--could this be the year of Hybrid Cloud?

Cloud was one of the hot topics at Enterprise Connect Orlando last March, and it remained a major issue at last week's UC Summit. But nobody's even suggesting that this means enterprises will be outsourcing all of their communications to the Cloud. The hot concept is not a noun (Cloud), it's a modifier: Hybrid.

In the course of a recent Enterprise Connect webinar, Michael Finneran presented some research he did with Webtorials, showing that 26% of the enterprises surveyed already are doing Hybrid Cloud for UC, and 42% expect to use Hybrid Cloud in the future--more than the number that say they'll go either all-CPE or all-cloud. For enterprise voice alone, 20% said they were using hybrid deployments today, projected to grow to 30% in the future:

Some vendors are also trying to make Hybrid Cloud easier for their channel to adopt and then sell. There was much discussion at the UC Summit of NEC Univerge Cloud Services' new model for enticing the channel to sell their offering. Basically, in a given deal, NEC Financial will buy the gear from the VAR, then lease it back to the end customer via the reseller. The idea is that the VAR can sustain its business model of collecting a significant share of the deal's value up front, while still enabling the customer to have the pay-as-you-go structure that represents the appeal of Cloud purchases for many user organizations.

So creative ideas about the cloud continue to emerge. But what exactly is a Hybrid Cloud? What part of a Hybrid Cloud should be private-cloud (i.e., your own CPE), and what part should live in a service provider's infrastructure? The answer, as usual, seems to be: It depends. We saw one approach in that recent EC webinar. Here's a sample breakdown of how an enterprise might divide up functions between the Private Cloud (i.e., the Enterprise) and the Public Cloud (i.e., the service provider):

Michael Finneran and Hardy Myers, CEO of AVST, offered the following list of 5 factors that represents a pretty good start on thinking about how to drive the decision:

* Take each UC component--call control, email, messaging, conferencing, fax, and other UC components--and determine its individual strategic value to your organization.

* Is confidentiality a major concern?

* How critical is reliability?

* Do you have dedicated IT staff to support the specific UC application?

* Is CAPEX or OPEX the best economic choice for the specific UC application?

None of these is really a new criterion when it comes to an outsourcing decision. What's gaining wider acceptance, however, is the notion of breaking down your communications application set into its component pieces, and making the insource/outsource decision on an app-by-app basis, using a set of criteria like this one. That wasn't really something you could do in the old Centrex world, nor was it something that providers showed much interest in enabling during the early days of hosted IP telephony.

Now that it's a part of the process for considering Hybrid Cloud, this closer look could wind up benefitting your business in some more basic ways. Presumably, before you can answer the above 5 questions for each communications application, you need an understanding of what that app is used for--and that may lead you into a discussion with business unit representatives that helps you understand whether the current applications set you have for communications is even the right mix--or what might actually be a better way to serve those BUs.

So Hybrid Cloud may be worth considering, and it's definitely worth studying.

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