City Services Delivered Over Mobile Cloud Infrastructure

Busan Metropolitan City launched a center to host a variety of services for its citizens. Operating like an app store for developers, the Busan Mobile Application Development Center (BMAC), marks the first phase of their deployment of Smart+Connected Community (S+CC) services -- in collaboration with Cisco and a local service provider, Korea Telecom (KT).

The plan is part of the Busan Green u-City (ubiquitous city) blueprint, which is in line with the national agenda to support environmentally sustainable economic growth in the country.

Busan, a bustling city of approximately 3.6 million residents, is located on the southeastern tip of the Korean peninsula. The second-largest city in South Korea, Busan occupies about 300 square miles (766 square kilometers), 8 percent of the entire Korean peninsula. Busan also has the country's largest container-handling port (fifth largest in the world) -- thanks to its accessibility from the Pacific Ocean, deep harbor and gentle tides.

Cisco Korea and Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) contributed to this blueprint, which includes the rollout of S+CC services such as urban mobility, distance learning, energy management, and safety and security by 2014.

The aim is to transform the way of life for Busan citizens, improve city management, and generate new economic growth in a sustainable environment.

"Busan is an advanced city and among the first to adopt the u-City concept in Korea. Because of its ICT infrastructure, Busan has decided to move faster toward becoming a green u-City. We are pleased to be able to collaborate with Cisco due to its rich experience in a variety of smart city projects," said Hur Nam Sik, mayor of Busan.

Cisco Smart+Connected Communities in Action

BMAC is phase 1 of Busan's Green u-City blueprint. The center will be based on a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) approach, in collaboration with KT and Cisco, for application developers to test and host city services.

Phase 2 will see the rollout of software-as-a-service (SaaS) managed cloud services, delivered by KT and powered by Cisco, such as billing automation, content management and document management by 2012.

Phase 3, planned for 2014, will see these services widely available to all citizens.

BMAC is built on a platform powered by the Cisco Unified Computing System, the Cisco 4500 backbone and SAN switches.

Busan expects the BMAC to act as a catalyst for app developers to make use of public data provided by Busan Metropolitan Government, which will allow them to develop innovative applications that will appeal to the general public and help improve the quality of life.

By providing a shared services development platform and creating an ecosystem for software developers, Busan expects to see new job opportunities in knowledge industries. Busan also plans to have these developers lead phase 2 of its blueprint, the delivery of S+CC cloud services.

Shared Vision for the Future of Hosted Collaboration

With the increased reliance on IT from business leaders, it's important for CIOs to understand the concerns of CEOs and the implications they may have on IT, according to Gartner, Inc.

"Business leaders see very uncertain times ahead in 2011, and they must defend growth despite falling business and consumer confidence," said Mark Raskino, vice president and Gartner Fellow.

According to Gartner's assessment, CIOs should target at least one major business process to be revolutionized or obliterated in 2011 or 2012 -- substantively improving how companies collaborate is one example.

BT and Cisco have a shared vision for the future of hosted collaboration and unified communications services, built on their insight across a variety of networked IT and communications services.

The companies' mutual understanding of complex network environments and solution provisioning has helped them deliver superior capability, service, and value with global reach.

BT and Cisco jointly addressed the ongoing transition to hosted collaboration, unified communications and Internet Protocol (IP) telephony services, including the developing demand for IP telephony as a cloud-based service, at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2010.

Collaboration: New Realities, Rules and Opportunities
Stephen Bruce, head of UCC and Mobility portfolios for multinational corporations at BT Global Services and Matt Rowan, manager of partner operations at Cisco, discussed the new realities, rules, and opportunities that stem from a cloud computing-based collaboration and unified communications strategy, including the implications of a utility-priced service.

Bruce said, "As more of our customers contemplate their end-of-life traditional telephony environments and look to embrace the cloud, they are obviously interested in the notion of moving their IP telephony applications into the cloud. The carefully planned transition to cloud-based IP telephony can help customers dramatically reduce upfront investment costs while accelerating the adoption of IP telephony and unified communications on a global scale."

Rowan said, "As businesses analyze their options related to the consumption of collaboration solutions, cloud models offer compelling value. We are seeing enormous demand for cloud based collaboration solutions. Customers are asking for a low risk, minimally disruptive transition, and I believe BT offers a solid answer."

BT, in collaboration with Cisco, announced its hosted unified communications and IP telephony service to business customers in the U.S. in June 2010.

The service allows businesses to bring converged voice, mobile and data services to every desktop in their organizations, using BT and Cisco's cloud computing-based technologies. BT can rapidly deploy services to both large and small sites, offering business customers significant savings as well as operational predictability.

Global Alliance Paves Way for Enterprise Cloud Services

Orange Business Services together with Cisco, EMC and VMware have formed a business alliance, called Flexible 4 Business -- to offer end-to-end cloud computing services for enterprises. This business alliance will help customers easily transition to cloud computing and gain the infrastructure flexibility, cost reduction and business performance optimization cloud computing enables.

Orange Business Services will be the service provider for the business alliance and will deliver the four types of pay-per-use managed cloud solutions based on the industry-leading technologies from the four partners.

Through Orange Business Services cloud portfolio supported by the Flexible 4 Business alliance, enterprises can realize the benefits of having IT as a service without the concern of building their own cloud computing infrastructure. Through a single service provider, customers will be able to accelerate the deployment of highly secure cloud services across their enterprise while reducing management complexity.

Orange Business Services is certified at the highest level by Cisco, EMC, and VMware to bring the network, server, storage, virtualization and management expertise necessary to integrate the entire cloud solution on a global basis. As the service provider in all Flexible 4 Business engagements, Orange Business Services will commit to tiered end-to-end service level agreements (SLAs).

"Orange Business Services has a long heritage in providing managed datacenter services and hosting and has combined this with its networking and security expertise to provide a growing suite of cloud computing services," said Peter Hall, principal analyst at Ovum.

"The Flexible 4 Business alliance brings together leading players in cloud computing so enterprises can have the confidence that solutions, including private cloud, are delivered and managed on a global scale to the highest standards."

Managed Cloud Services offered by Flexible 4 Business:

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS):
Private cloud: Customized solutions based on Vblock Infrastructure Packages that combine best-in-class virtualization, networking, computing, storage, security, and management technologies from Cisco, EMC and VMware, together with a comprehensive service catalogue (computing, storage, operating systems, middleware) based on platforms hosted in Orange datacenters, sub-parties datacenters or in customers datacenters. The related services are managed by Orange Business Services on an "as-a-service" mode enabling the expected flexibility in a highly secured environment. Back-up services: Highly secure hosted and managed back-up solution delivered as-a-service: evolving and charged according to real usage, enabling customers to benefit from an effective solution that grows with their requirement and does not require initial investments.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS):
Security services: Enable the ability to offer anti-virus and URL filtering solutions as-a-service. These SaaS solutions enable all users to benefit from immediate protection even when out of the office, and for customers to roll out precise security policies within seconds. Unified communications services: Comprehensive unified communications solution hosted and managed from Orange Business Services datacenters to reduce costs. Services are available from all types of terminals. Administrators can allocate services as required and therefore adapt usage and costs to the precise needs of the company.

"Cloud computing has truly come of age with Flexible 4 Business," said Vivek Badrinath, chief executive officer, Orange Business Services. "Today's business alliance will make cloud computing a reachable reality for global enterprises, providing for our customers' security requirements and mitigating the complexity of technical migration. Orange Business Services has built its reputation catering to the global business needs of multinationals. With industry's top cloud players we will ease the migration for our enterprise customers."

Enterprise 2.0: Hosted Collaboration Solutions

New cloud-based business technology applications are reinventing workplace collaboration -- to address the needs of forward-looking organizations and their essential employees, in today's more economically frugal operating environment.

Progressive business leaders are breaking down traditional communication silos by creating the environment for key staff to easily connect with peers and readily share information across globally dispersed organizations. How will they be able to fuel this ongoing transformation?

Cisco announced the availability of the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution that allows service providers to offer their customers a wide range of collaboration applications -- via the cloud, using a "business technology as a service" model.

The Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution, which builds on existing hosted Unified Communications offerings, provides customers with unprecedented flexibility in choosing how they deploy collaboration applications throughout their organizations.

"Our customers are eager to put cloud-based unified communications applications to the test. Verizon Business' field trial of Cisco's Hosted Collaboration Solution builds on a proven track record the two companies have established developing and delivering innovative solutions to market, while marking an important milestone on Verizon Business' path to deliver 'Everything-as-a-Service' for our customers worldwide," said Anthony Recine, vice president of networking and communications solutions for Verizon Business.

How On-Demand Solutions Drive Business Agility
The hosted option helps businesses to rapidly deploy collaboration technologies while potentially lowering upfront capital and ongoing operating expenses.

The Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution gives service providers and integrators the ability to deploy multiple collaboration applications on one server in a virtualized environment and then host those applications for multiple client organizations.

"Delivering our customers the broadest-range and highest-quality hosted unified communications and collaboration services is one of our core businesses. The Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution will allow us to achieve this goal with an excellent operational efficiency and profitability for our clients," said Paul Molinier, vice president, Unified Communications and Collaboration Business Unit, Orange.

The solution is designed to be run from managed service provider data centers. It's optimized for delivery by the Cisco Unified Computing System, part of the Cisco Unified Service Delivery solution. It's proven to combine the power of the datacenter with the power of the network -- to transform service delivery and build the foundation for cloud services.

Leading service providers will offer one of the most comprehensive collaboration services available and can easily deploy large, multi-customer installations. By using a common infrastructure, providers can potentially save money while delivering their customers a superior user experience -- regardless of the service deployment model (hosted, managed, or on-premise).

"Delivering hosted unified communications and collaboration services is a demanding and complex operation. We're excited to be working with the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution, which is designed to simplify operations and deliver services in the most efficient and profitable manner," said Roger Wuethrich-Hasenboehler, executive vice president and member of the board, Swisscom.

Savvy business executives and their IT leaders continue to benefit from the operational efficiencies of out-tasking core business technology applications. They're shifting their internal resources to more strategic initiatives -- while enabling the just-in-time provision of feature rich communications service delivery.

Managed and Cloud Services Market Study

Cisco and Verizon Business will host a live webcast to unveil new findings from a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Cisco and discuss new opportunities in managed and cloud services for service providers and enterprises.

Key findings from the market study include:

• Global managed services growth will outpace technology growth in 2010 by more than double.
• The total global managed services opportunity will be $217 billion by 2014.

Join Ellen Daley, Forrester Research vice president; Will Scott, Cisco global director of managed solutions; and Joseph Crawford, Verizon Business executive director of IT solutions, for an online discussion on these major market trends.

Managed and Cloud Services: Opportunities in a Transitioning Market

Date: Thursday, June 10, 2010

Time: 8 to 9 a.m. (PDT) / 11 a.m. to noon (EDT)

Register, in advance, at:
Cisco Verizon Business Webcast