What’s the future of pureplay cloud IT services firms?
February 6, 2015
Grazed from Diginomica. Author: Phil Wainewright.
As cloud computing becomes more mainstream and moves progressively further upmarket into ever-larger enterprise deals, will the pioneering cloud-only integrators such as Appirio, Astadia, Bluewolf and Cloud Sherpas get left behind? It’s increasingly the big-brand global systems integrators (GSIs) — Accenture, Deloitte and PwC, among others — that get brought into the high-value projects.
It may have been the smaller firms that helped build market presence for the likes of Salesforce and Google Apps at a time when the established SIs thought cloud applications were beneath them. But that history counts for little when big bucks are at stake. Now that the global SIs are taking cloud seriously, the vendors are not only happy to work with them but often eager to leverage their existing client relationships…
No return to the old ways
To ensure they don’t get muscled aside, the cloud pureplays have to continue to offer something distinctive to the market. In a blog post in the run-up to Dreamforce last October, Appirio CEO Chris Barbin argued there’s a danger the established firms will import ingrained and outdated practices into cloud deployments that mark a return to the “old ways” of costly, long-term contracts. In A Plea to the Cloud Industry — Demand Competitiveness, he wrote:…
Read more from the source @ http://diginomica.com/2015/02/06/whats-the-future-of-pureplay-cloud-it-services-firms/