The backbone to our submission to the Canadian Government’s call for ideas on managing their $400m VC infusion will be the ‘CICP Cloud Accelerator’ program.

As described here the CICP stands for the Canadian Innovation Commercialization Program, and is intended as the primary method by which the Government of Canada implements Procurement Commercialization. In short they use their own buying as the stimulus for encouraging and supporting new innovations.

What you will also see is that the program covers four priority areas, one of which is IT. This is described at a very high level in non-detailed terms, with Cloud computing being relevant to the IM section.

This is described in only the barest of a few bullet points, so there is no ‘How To’ guide as part of this process that would help entrepreneurs better understand and devise new technology ventures.

GC Community Cloud – The Canada Cloud Roadmap

This is where we come in.

With our in-depth expert focus on Cloud Computing, this is a field where we can advise entrepreneurs at the detail level on the Canadian Government`s plans.

Indeed the opportunity for Canada to redress their innovation deficit situation is to leverage existing assets, where hand in hand with world-class Cloud Privacy By Design best practices, the government has also defined a Cloud product roadmap, called the ‘GC Community Cloud’.

This is described in this 18-page PDF presentation, and as you can see here on our main Cloud best practices site, we have used the public documentation as the basis for listing the elements that make up Enterprise Cloud Computing best practices.

A Taxonomy for Cloud Innovation

It is an invaluable guide for Cloud entrepreneurs because it organizes the Canadian Governments plans for the Cloud technologies they will procure, across a matrix of their short and long term horizons, and then also decomposes the overall architecture into a number of different sub-components.

In short it provides a taxonomy of the technology segments that make up the overall Cloud picture, a blueprint that provides a keystone for our Canada Cloud Roadmap, including:

• Private and Community Clouds
• Network and security architectures
• Common Messaging Platform
• Shared applications
• Cloud Provisioning Services

Given the early stage of the Cloud market we’re in, some of these areas are still very embryonic, meaning they are the fertile areas ideal for new product innovations, and what we can do is help entrepreneurs find the right partners and experts to help build new ventures in these areas.

For example if you check out slide 14 you’ll see example areas being ‘GEDS 2.0′ in the short term, evolving to Federated Identity in the long term, which we can map to our Cloud Identity best practices, or Virtual Computing Service evolving to Public Cloud Peering, which is a function of Cloud Brokering.

Helping to define the required technical strategies and funding approaches for ventures in these areas, is the purpose of our Technology Strategy Board, so we can call upon a significant resource to fast-track ideas through the CICP process.