TELUS Taps Jamcracker for SaaS

TELUS is the latest service provider to join forces with Jamcracker to deliver business customers, potentially including other carriers, software as a service.

The Canada-based service provider expects to go to market with about a dozen SaaS applications, such as Hosted Exchange, BlackBerry Wireless, WebEx conferencing and popular security offers, in the first quarter, said Walter Van Norden, director of the TELUS Future Suite program. The company expects to follow that in the second quarter with TELUS proprietary SaaS solutions related to human resources, adds Brent Allison, vice president marketing of TELUS Partner Solutions, explaining that will include online tools, which TELUS uses internally today, addressing things like employee training, succession and performance management.

While TELUS sees small and medium businesses as the sweet spot for its SaaS products, Allison said that even large businesses, such as other carriers with around 20,000 employees, are interested in such solutions. He adds that many service providers in the U.S. have been “intrigued” with the paperless culture TELUS was able to adopt at least in part due to its E.H.R. (electronic human resources) program and tools (described, in part, above).

The idea of enabling business customers to outsource their applications to service providers came into vogue several years ago with the ASP (application service provider) craze. Allison said that business model didn’t succeed because it required dedicated infrastructure for each customer. However, this new SaaS model offers the scalability that the ASP did not because it allows multiple customers to be serviced on a shared architecture, said Allison, noting he used to work in the ASP business unit at Nortel and has always believed in the benefits of service providers hosting applications.

He added the time also is right for SaaS due to the multitude of applications organizations require, which creates a complex task for CIOs. The fact that many businesses are growing through acquisition, and thus want an integrated and manageable solution for their applications, is another argument for SaaS, Allison continued.

“We really believe the timing is right for Jamcracker’s revival,” he said.

Jamcracker operates the Jamcracker Services Delivery Network (JSDN), a business process outsourcing solution that includes a hosted services-delivery platform, content/ISV wholesale distribution agreements, help desk services, billing, collections, settlement and infrastructure management.

Steve Crawford, vice president of marketing for Jamcracker, explained the JSDN is an ecosystem that enables on-demand solution providers and distributors to source and deliver and support various types of on-demand services. “Jamcracker has a platform that can either be run as a completely hosted service or could be installed at a site, and can be federated across different locations,” he said. “Jamcracker is like the Ingram-Micro of SaaS. We aggregate different SaaS solutions from different application providers.”

Jamcracker negotiates master distribution agreements with outfits like Microsoft, WebEx and others so it can wholesale their on-demand services. And, from a technological perspective, Jamcracker offers an adapter that enables its platform to provision users, and do single sign on for end users, for those applications, he said, so Jamcracker can unify the delivery and support of all of the disparate application services. However, he noted, Jamcracker doesn’t actually host the applications; rather, it makes the applications look as if they’re all coming from a single source.

Jamcracker www.jamcracker.com.
TELUS www.telus.com 

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