One of Immediate's key advantages is the tremendous flexibility it offers by design. This flexibility is particularly true in terms of how to begin implementation.

On one hand it might replace whole existing enterprise-wide eBusiness, web or eCommerce channels at a stroke. On the other it can be deployed in very specific value-add opportunities within particular functions or even to benefit particular interactions. Social CRM is an excellent example of this. By deploying individual services organisations can draw down specific value in the short term, perhaps through Identity-and-Access management or Web Content Management 'as-a-service'.

Of course understanding the offering and the marketplace is key, and Capgemini can bring to bear its consulting expertise to help with this where appropriate. That might mean assessing the opportunities outlined above, defining the IT architecture and planning the integration, or defining roadmaps to progress the solution into other areas of opportunity without putting the solution integrity at risk.

The SaaS and Cloud components of the Capgemini Immediate service reduce, or even remove, many of the up-front time and cost investments of traditional IT approaches. That means minimum investments of cost and time are generally significantly lower, so it can be deployed in a manner, and at a level, to suit your organisation.

Given the nature of these economics, it's not unusual for organisations to start with pilots or proof-of-concepts. With Immediate these can deliver extraordinarily wide-ranging and tangible solutions at very modest cost points. That in turn builds confidence and stakeholder awareness quickly.

The level of personalisation for each Capgemini Immediate solution is high, and your specific requirements will dictate the exact shape of the solution. That said, certain constants exist from both a commercial and a technical perspective.

From the commercial perspective every solution brings Capgemini's total accountability and the benefit of contracting for a business outcome. From the technical perspective every solution hinges around our Federated Business Platform, onto which your suite of services will be configured, and our integrated customer management platform that will give you visibility of customer interactions across the eBusiness services.

Within different industries patterns emerge in the types of eBusiness services deployed. These vary significantly from industry to industry but core services tend to include: self-service and rich electronic interaction for the core business; gateways to partners and affiliated authorities; brand-stretch or value add into new services and revenue streams; and transformative eServices for that specific industry.

A number of factors have come together to enable Immediate now. Firstly, the rapid emergence of Software-as-a-Service and Cloud Services offerings provide an alternative to the traditional model of up-front investment and through-life depreciation.

Secondly, the maturity of this marketplace has exceeded all but the most optimistic predictions. The ongoing acceleration in the emergence of Cloud Service offerings has made them more and more relevant to more types of organisations, and able to deliver a broader set of requirements to each.

But thirdly, integrating and federating these new types of services requires a wholly new approach, and one towards which Capgemini has been working hard for the past 18 months. Integrating 'best-of-breed' software has been done many times, but integrating services marks a step-change: a change commercially, a change contractually, and a change in terms of the technology required.

As you would expect from a thought leader in the field of cloud computing and software-as-a-service, Capgemini is willing to stand-up to the commercial models of the cloud. The first step to achieving that forms part of our supplier due diligence: this includes assessing the charging mechanisms of potential providers. We look at these through a client's eyes, and give priority to those willing and able to offer more elastic charging mechanisms. Those can, in turn, be tailored to base the overall pricing structure on the needs of different organisations in different industries. One result of that approach is that cloud service providers whose charging mechanisms are actually fairly inelastic, or are actually based on supply-side provision of resources or licenses, are given the lowest priority.

The second step involves using our hard won commercial experience to aggregate those charging models into a single, unified model - one that is appropriate and digestible for each Immediate client. That might mean a model based on a client's preferred scale or usage metrics, or one based on their actual business outcomes. Where appropriate, we will consider sharing risk with Immediate clients to help bridge any gap between what the cloud marketplace has to offer and what clients specifically require.

The Ecosystem of partners within Capgemini Immediate is not static, but dynamic. Month-by-month that Ecosystem evolves with the marketplace around it, under Capgemini's management. New services and vendors are engaged, vetted and brought in as innovations emerge or are required by an Immediate user, while under-performing ones can be managed out in the event of, for example, operational issues or lack-of-innovation.

As an explicit part of its Operating Model, the Capgemini Immediate team continually interrogate the Cloud marketplace and commentators. That means identifying new high performers and those with high potential, ensuring that Capgemini Immediate clients get access to them simply and quickly.

This pro-active research and engagement is built into the cost of the Immediate service and takes advantage of the economies-of-scale of doing this across Capgemini's global client-set. It harnesses Capgemini's global network of SaaS, eBusiness and Open Source platform experts.

Absolutely. Both the operating model and the technology platform that form the core of the Immediate offering are explicitly designed to enable exactly this.

However the nature of Immediate's capabilities and economics is such that there is normally value in understanding whether on-streaming new SaaS solutions might actually prove to be cost neutral or better.

Capgemini Immediate has been designed to meet all leading security standards and regulations, from ISO 27001 to PCI - as you would expect from an organisation that has been heavily involved in the Cloud Security Alliance from its inception.

Cloud use brings different security and data questions to those of a traditional model. Although not all are issues. In some areas Cloud has advantages: for example multi-tenancy from quality Cloud providers tends to drive leading procedures and lightning quick response times in the event of data or security issues. These are then patched once, at source, to the immediate benefit of all users.

That said there are often real and valid concerns for enterprise users of Cloud services: for example data residency, service availability and access to take data out. These are areas where Capgemini has used its experience in the Enterprise IT world to enable Immediate to bridge the gaps. All service providers agree to certain terms during the due diligence process on joining the Ecosystem; and Immediate's Federated Business Platform is used, for example, to filter data for residency concerns and replicate data for lock-in concerns.