Written: Jun 2008 Tweaked: Mar 2009 T. E. Gray -------------------------------------------------------------- "Offer Sheet" for use in cloud-sourcing conversations (v7) -------------------------------------------------------------- CONTEXT and ASSUMPTIONS . The university's mission of discovery is being transformed by IT. . Consumer-oriented IT products and web-based services are transforming the practice of IT. . Advertising-based services and high-scale providers are transforming the economics of IT. . The opportunities for the university community to drive the market through standards and local innovation are fewer than in the 1990s. . The technology industry is proving able to deliver and rapidly evolve collaboration, personal productivity and other tools far faster, much less expensively and with much more extensive user and partner bases, and typically provide considerably greater functionality/capabilities than any individual or small group of universities can possibly achieve. . The university is facing difficult prioritization decisions, given budget and space constraints. . The university is facing difficult challenges in attracting and retaining top IT talent give a) competition from Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, b) high local housing prices, c) changes in the nature of UW's IT mission. . The university is a federation of many independent businesses; its governance is "aggressively decentralized", and its technology environment will never be homogeneous. Thus, no single vendor/service-provider will capture all of our community. . Within a providers' range of offerings, including free and for-fee, we would expect significant numbers to embrace the free services, but some individuals and/or groups will opt to use for-fee services. . Cross-platform interoperability and vendor-neutrality remain goals for the university IT environment. Both open and defacto standards are important. . Within the university community, there are distinct customer segments that will gravitate toward specific (and proprietary) products, services, or vendors. For example, some number of people will be well-served by a Microsoft technology environment, others will be well-served by a Google technology environment. Both must be able to co-exist and interoperate at some level. . The university is committed to "global engagement and connectedness", and its research and teaching objectives are indeed world-wide; thus, global access to information is essential. . Mobility is a key trend, and industry standards for interoperability (e.g. syncML) have been problematic. Various forms of smartphones (including both RIM Blackberries and Apple iPhones) are important factors in the effectiveness of our knowledge workers. . Social networking is a key trend, and the ability to easily create and publish content, and comment on others' content is essential. . Collaboration tools are fundamental to the stock-and-trade of a university, and collaboration across institutional boundaries is essential. WHAT DOES UW SEEK? Strategically, UW seeks: . State-of-the-art personal productivity and collaboration tool capabilities for its community. . Reduced costs for providing "commodity" IT. . The ability to focus tech staff on highest-value activities. . Agile response to changing IT market conditions and opportunities. . Ways to maximize the effectiveness of our knowledge workers, as they collaboratively discover, invent, and innovate, within and without UW's organizational boundaries. . Strategic partnerships with the industry players who are and will be shaping the future of IT. . To encourage open standards, as a way of maximizing consumer choice at minimum cost. Examples include IMAP, XMPP, HTTP, HTML, XML, CalDav. . To avoid lock-ins that make it technically, legally, financially, or operationally difficult to move to a different solution if necessary. . To avoid unpleasant surprises in relationships and services, e.g. changes in service without adequate notice or recourse. Tactically, UW seeks to: . Take advantage of "free" and low-cost IT services from exemplary high-scale providers such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft. . Address (some) reputational risk of security incidents via partnership with provider. . Take advantage of geographic diversity and redundancy of cloud clusters. . Leverage higher-ed research networks to reduce the cost and increase the performance of using cloud-based services. . Work with providers to make cross-institution collaboration easier (via, e.g. Shibboleth --a federated identity mgt system--, Grouper, etc.) . Work with providers to make cross-vendor interoperability a reality. . Work with providers to integrate web-based/cloud services with our enterprise identity and access management infrastructure where appropriate. . Help shape future product/service offerings, e.g. surrounding group management, which is the cornerstone of collaboration tools. . For online services, have acceptable application performance, both in terms of speed and variability, and the ability to operate on documents offline. . Have an easy migration path from one service offering to another, within the provider's set, and support for individual, departmental, and institution-wide arrangements as appropriate. . Ensure that we are able to carry out our legal/regulatory obligations with respect to data stored on non-UW servers. WHAT DOES VENDOR SEEK? . More eyeballs to try and monetize. . More data to refine targeted ads . A larger population of free-services users, some percentage of which will opt for additional for-fee services. . Access to a highly-distributed, cross-platform, multi-disciplinary, multi-institution collaborative community that constitutes an extraordinary laboratory for exploring advanced IT offerings. UW STAKEHOLDERS . Purchasing . Risk Management . CISO & PASSC . Deans . UTAC . Students, faculty, staff . UW Technology, esp middleware team