Right now, the one predictable thing is the unpredictability of the environment in which enterprises are operating. It seems fairly logical, then, that so many businesses are striving for ways to introduce predictability into the way service is delivered.

Simultaneously, however, businesses today are depending on flexibility.  With supply and demand so uncertain in the shifting sands of today's global economy, nobody wants to be left either paying for surplus, redundant or underused resource - be it human, machine or network-based - or, conversely, struggling to exploit a rise in demand because of insufficient resource.

The trouble is, of course, that wanting predictability and flexibility is a bit like wanting it to be summer and winter at the same time.  Operational predictability surely means knowing what people, technology and data you have and are using and processing at any given time - being able to forecast the costs that your enterprise will bear not just this week, but next week, next month. 

Flexibility, on the other hand, seems diametrically opposed.  To be flexible, you need to accept you are dealing with unknown factors, some of which could have a material impact on your chances of success.  You must be comfortable with the fact that you don't know how much cost you might incur next month, because you don't know what demand will be, but that whatever the demand is your business will be able to flex with it.  Only incurring more cost if there is more revenue coming in.

Predictability or flexibility: heads or tails, left or right.  Pick one, but don't expect to have both. You can't.  It's impossible.  Isn't it?

At the moment, customers often talk to us about how they can achieve flexibility, without losing the ability to innovate as they move forward. More often than not, this enquiry is prompted by growing awareness of cloud computing, possibly the most talked about topic in the IT industry today.  Gartner’s most recent hype cycle suggests that cloud computing might be about to slip into a trough of disillusionment – regardless of whether this is true or not, there is no doubt that it will not be long before it is climbing the slope of true, meaningful enlightenment.

Enterprises have read and heard a lot about the coming revolution - about how services and applications will be hosted on and run from the internet, or 'cloud', and how this will save millions of dollars and herald greater flexibility - but they are rarely confident that their understanding of it is sufficient.

The industry has gone from a broad understanding of cloud computing as a set of services that are delivered over the internet, to a more refined understanding of what cloud computing is and can offer. There are in fact more 'clouds' than just the internet, and too often people talk about 'computing', when actually we should be explaining there is a range of IT services that are delivered or aggregated for a set of users to utilise.

In terms of the flexibility versus predictability quandary, however, what's most important about the cloud computing example is why it is such a big trend in the market in the first place.  A key driver for using cloud computing is an enterprise wanting to introduce an application quickly, and also maybe only wanting to have it available for a short space of time - for example, when it wants to launch a new customer application.  Another is when an enterprise wants to use and make services available to a broad range of people, maybe across multiple organisations or countries or geographies, and it wants that ubiquitous access as well as users to be able to move around and have ubiquitous access to the data and services they’ve stored.

In short, the cloud is offering the flexibility to innovate quickly, to respond to customer demand with simple, cost-effective new applications or services, while also offering the knowability of ease-of-access.  If it is internet-based, it's available to all.  This is a kind of predictability, and it's one of the first times that an information and communication technology solution has arisen that offers both.

If cloud computing has a key role, it is to underpin businesses being collaborative by having a known and predictable infrastructure, that can be deployed and accessed quickly, and that can be used by people flexibly, wherever they are.

In customer services, for example, this is like gold dust.  Increasingly, businesses are delivering customer service globally. That requires that they network agents and operations, data centres as well as contact centres. And as they roll-out in new countries and make new sites available, customer service has to be available first, and it also has to be there last when they are taking down the service or the operation as well.  Customer service is, without doubt, the point at which the forces of and requirements for flexibility and predictability collide, because it is the most dynamic area of a business.

Enterprises can’t predict the known customer service requirement in the future.  Crystal balls do not yet exist.  But they can achieve the flexibility that will allow them to operate predictably.  They can run services that mean they know they will be geared up to handle unpredictable customer demand.

What this example serves to show is that flexibility and predictability are not inherently in conflict with one another.  Understanding that is the first step to achieving both. 

When networks first originated, nobody foresaw the full power of the internet, and the exact way it would change things.  Phrases like 'cloud computing' had not been coined.  The latest generation of networks, underpinned by intelligent services, are designed with services like cloud computing, virtualisation and unified communications in mind.  They are equipped not only to handle the new technical challenges that these services present - such as increasing data volumes and web-based traffic - but to make the previously impossible, possible.  Where achieving flexibility before would have come at the cost of predictability, intelligent networks today enable enterprises to scale services up and down with demand, but retain full operational predictability.

In some ways, this is the Henry Ford moment of the network.  The days of hand-crafting IP VPN networks are drawing to an end.  With its own Intelligent Network services offer, BT is taking its many years of experience, capturing it, codifying it and using it to enable the network to be ‘built’ and operated by automated systems.  These networks are designed to be self-configuring, self-healing, with automatic fault detection and correction, self-protecting and self-optimising.

Predictability and flexibility are absolutely at the heart of this move – both achievable, both complementary and both delivered without one compromising the other.  By delivering a range of online quotation, provisioning and service management tools, Intelligent Networks mean that customers receive fast and accurate quotations, timely and predictable delivery schedules and a proactive, decentralised service management, at the same time as the ability to scale network provision up and down at the turn of a dial.  Optimisation services dynamically monitor the network to ensure that it is operating to its maximum and prioritising applications, meaning that the foundation for flexible cloud-based computing, for example, is not only present but giving the maximum return.

We are on the cusp of a new era for information and communication technology.  Lots of cloudy concepts and applications that have been talked about for some time are beginning to coalesce, become clear - and embed themselves within enterprises.  Cloud computing, unified communications, collaborative web 2.0 tools; they are all finally here, right now.  It's time to throw away conventional wisdom and entrenched notions of what's possible and what isn't, and get excited about the potential for delivering dynamic new services while cutting costs.  Looking at the economic climate outside, there's certainly never been a better time for it.