TM Forum announced today that Sean Kelley, Deutsche Bank’s Global CIO for Deutsche Asset Management (the asset management arm of Deutsche Bank AG) and Head of the Bank’s Platform Services Group, has taken a leading role within the Forum’s cloud services initiatives by becoming chairman of the Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council (ECLC). Sean’s commitment to the ECLC is indicative of the value of TM Forum’s cloud services initiatives for the global enterprise and communications IT industries.

Sean Kelley’s appointment as chairman of the leadership council demonstrates solid commitment by one of the world’s leading banks to TM Forum’s Cloud Services Initiative. In this new role, Kelley will also join the Cloud Service Initiative Steering Group.

The ECLC represents the users of cloud services within the Forum’s Cloud Services Initiative, which plans to stimulate growth of a vibrant and open marketplace for cloud services by bringing together the entire eco-system of enterprise users and cloud providers. The initiative will remove barriers to and accelerate adoption of cloud services by collaboratively establishing industry standards and best practices.

The role of the Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council is to develop common approaches on important aspects of cloud services that will reduce buyer risk and resistance. These are aspects such as common terminology, common approaches to allow transparent movement from supplier to supplier; security issues, benchmarking and more.

Members of the Cloud Services Initiative include some of the world’s largest technology vendors including CA, Cisco, HP, IBM, and Microsoft, leading service providers such as AT&T, BT and Telstra and large enterprise users such as Deutsche Bank and The Commonwealth Bank of Australia.