Gartner’s been gazing at its crystal ball again, and has forecast that service-led solutions – software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and so forth – will displace more traditional sourcing methods by 2015.

The analyst house stresses that IT companies need to “bridge legacy offerings and new services”, again pointing a future to the cloud for service providers.

And cloud services appear to be growing at a much quicker rate than other elements of the IT services market. Hardware and software support will grow slowly compared to IaaS and BPaaS (business process as a service), which will grow 13.1% and 47.3% in 2013 respectively according to Gartner.

There are three recommendations Gartner has for service providers this year; stopping undifferentiated marketing messages, emphasising business value to ‘transform clients’ existing operations’; improving service delivery by reinventing the service portfolio; and determining …