The bare bones skeleton of the Canada Cloud Roadmap is now available – This provides the outline document that we will then populate with exciting new Cloud products and services.

The first of these is ‘UCaaS’ – Unified Communications as a Service.

How we build and launch new Cloud services is the magic formula that we call ‘Procurement Commercialization’, which is the ultra-simple process of using government procurement as the ‘inputs’ for this planning process.

One or many procurement documents, like RFP bids from MERX, can contain all the requirements needed for certain parts of the Roadmap.

For example my next main project for the Roadmap is this RFP from the Ontario Council of Universities for a ‘Discovery System’. This specification could underpin `EDaaS` – E-Discovery as a Service, and thus add another step to the Roadmap.

Procurement Innovation

Furthermore governments can play an even more proactive role in participating in the innovation process, including directly asking for innovative new solutions via the traditional RFP process. This is what the Canadian Federal Government called for in their ‘Improving Canada`s Digital Advantage‘.

This section profiles Canadian Cloud CIO Leadership including Dave Nicholl, CIO for Ontario. Dave is certainly one of Canada`s inspirational pioneers of different aspects of Cloud adoption in Canada, including this type of innovation-boosting process.

Recently his team have been laying the ground for local development of innovative `UCaaS` solutions, with IT Canada reporting here  the Province of Ontario is planning to plunge into this specific sector.

You can see how this type of demand can map to stimulating vendor solutions and Cloud product innovation, such as Cisco recently announcing an implementation of their UCaaS platform by CSC in the Canadian market.

Given this visible statement of intent by the Province, made through their established and open procurement process, it will encourage others to follow suit and also make investments in more locally available service, creating this economically explosive catalyst effect.