Forrester

Why Read This Report

During the past two years, the initial exploratory interest by enterprise customers in cloud services has shifted toward more aggressive implementation plans, and the strategies of the global IT infrastructure outsourcing service providers have shifted along with it. Moreover, the substitution of cloud services for more traditional IT services — including infrastructure and applications outsourcing — has already begun. As a result, suppliers have become more active in formulating comprehensive cloud-oriented strategies spanning the spectrum of private cloud services, numerous as-a-service models, and, in some cases, public cloud offerings. For the near term, we expect vendor strategies for the cloud will continue to evolve and the cloud ecosystem will remain volatile. Sourcing and vendor management (SVM) professionals should be aware of these industry dynamics in order to leverage savings and productivity improvements in their sourcing contracts both now and in the future.