“Co-op Cloud” – Forming a cooperative to provide services, support and combined buying power to smaller, similar businesses.  Like a farm co-op, where small farms get together and share the expensive combine, pool purchasing to get better prices, pool management for some common and shared services – a Co-op cloud does the same.  This partnering to create a co-op allows these similar businesses to tailor the services and offerings to meet the sometimes specific needs of their industry.

UNC Chapel Hill and NC State are working to form a “co-op cloud” around enterprise services, specifically HR and Finance.  Universities have unique requirements and a co-op format allows us to set the requirements to fit our needs and allows us to control the SLA.

The co-op format will allow us to get to scale (hence low cost per service measure) and reduce duplication in resources needed to provide the services.  This will be a challenging transformation but has the potential to provide the best combination of cloud services, university focused support and services and partnering of our excellent staff to improve effectiveness and efficiency.

More to come as plans develop.