Outsourcing commodity capabilities to the low-cost provider while focusing your strategic value-add on customized offerings is an oft-repeated pattern in the world of business, but it hasn’t really taken hold in the world of IT until the rise of Cloud Computing. The reason it’s taken so long for the techies is because we’ve never been able to separate control and responsibility in the past as well as we can today. Before the Cloud, if we wanted to outsource one, then the other went along for the ride. Any enterprise that outsourced their entire IT operation went down this road. Sure, your technology becomes somebody else’s responsibility, but you end up giving up control as well.