Turning the tables on cloud service providers

Experienced customers are now calling the shots

When the cloud computing bandwagon got underway about a decade ago, it was met with much eye-rolling and scepticism within the IT pro community. It wasn’t that IT teams didn’t see the potential, it was more that the industry marketing machine got totally out of control. Evangelists positioned cloud services as the answer to all IT problems, with rhetoric that predicted the death of on-premise infrastructure and a shrinking role for all those working in enterprise IT.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if the service provider community could actually deliver on the promises. With every player making it up as they went along in their own unique way, however, the early market was defined by immaturity, inconsistency and all too often by customer confusion and disappointment.

But the industry kept pushing and pushing and IT teams in the mainstream gradually relented. Even though few bought into the hype, and services weren’t always scoped and shaped in a way they would ideally want, they began to experiment and tentatively adopt what was on offer. There was a sense, though, that activity was primarily driven by vendor and service provider agendas and interests rather than those of the customer.

Wind the clock forward and our latest survey of 166 IT professionals paints quite a different picture.

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Dale Vile

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Dale is a co-founder of Freeform Dynamics, and today runs the company. As part of this, he oversees the organisation’s industry coverage and research agenda, which tracks technology trends and developments, along with IT-related buying behaviour among mainstream enterprises, SMBs and public sector organisations.