It’s important to examine the current ‘state of play’ for cloud delivered solutions based on a couple of key dimensions; what is being deployed in the cloud and who is providing the IT service from the cloud.

The image conjured up by the term “cloud” is that of companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft delivering large-scale computing infrastructure that eliminate the need for on-premises IT equipment and software. Since these cloud providers build their own infrastructure rather than buying from product manufacturers, it could be argued they are shrinking the market share.

The Opportunity is Larger than the Threat

However, there are other categories of service providers that balance, more than offset the reduced spend and create an opportunity:

Consumer SaaS providers aggregate consumer-spend into centralised shared enterprise infrastructure. Consumer applications that traditionally consumed end user equipment are moving to the cloud triggering a need for enterprise infrastructure. While …