A key facet of the of the Canada Health Infoway Cloud strategy document, is that it identifies services key to the ‘PaaS’ (Platform as a Service) layer of Cloud computing.

So it’s a good general intro for product strategy at this layer of the Cloud services stack, especially when built around such a large, high-growth industry like Healthcare.

CEBP Transformation

Service providers who deploy Cloud technology that runs the IP communications procotol ‘SIP’, will be able to offer associated hosting options: SIP Cloud Services, providing core features such as:

• Connect apps to VoIP telephony via ‘SIP Trunking‘
• Programmable APIs for Presence and Messaging
• Video conferencing and Telepresence

Making all of these services accessible primarily to an audience of software developers, rather than telecomms managers, is the disruptive shift that PaaS represents.

This reflects a maturity in the industry as well as a step up the Cloud standards model: To date we have mainly experienced an IaaS market, which is a relatively small evolution of the existing web hosting markey. Big in scale but not necessarily revolutionary in terms of software design and delivery methods.

In contrast PaaS will be felt most keenly by software programmers, rather than infrastructure managers; naturally.

CEBP Transformation

To illustrate the point and explain SIP Cloud Services we can look at a special topic from the teleomms industry: CEBP, standing for Communications Enabled Business Process.

In short this means using Unified Communications capabilities, like voice communications, voicemails, faxing, video conferencing, Presence and Instant Messaging, etc., can be accessible to a programmer then building an overall product set: Healthcare workflows for example.

These are ideal building blocks for more dynamic and collaborate BPM (Business Process Management), and so a set of SIP Cloud Services that offer the functionality would be great apps for these sectors.

Building blocks is the key term, because it`s not traditional telco product > phones, switchboards, .. that comes as physical devices to sell to the office staff, but is rather a catalogue of software components that developers pick and choose from. I.e. An apps store.

Healthcare from the Canada Cloud

The Canada Health Infoway paper sets the scene for services at this layer – There is a keen focus on business transformation and also more emphasis on the complexities of applications and integrations, rather than the basic IaaS building blocks.

As you might expect the most likely sources of this new layer of PaaS services would come from Canadian based suppliers; however equally the fact it is only software components running on IaaS, it`s also likely USA and other providers will emerge, especially when the platform is so readily accessible and common to all Healthcare markets.