I've just been reading a Gartner article (http://bit.ly/kEHFsr) from last summer about consumerization, and it's made me realise another key difference between traditional IT outsourcing models and Cloud commoditization.
Having seen a few big outsourcing projects over the years (and still bearing the scars, to be honest), the trap is that whilst clients are looking to derive greater value for lower cost, for suppliers the only way to achieve it is to fix down requirements at the beginning to be able to control cost over the lifetime of the contract. And that bolting down is where it all goes wrong – it's next to impossible to comfortably predict the next five minutes in this game, let alone the next five or ten years. Net result – what's specified at time of contract is out of date before the ink has even dried, and ultimately both sides end up unhappy. (I'm sure that there must be exceptions to this, glowing examples of outsourced success, but I haven't ever seen one in my limited experience).
So, to the gentlemen in the crowd who claim Cloud is but another guise for outsourcing – well, no. It isn't. It's commoditized, so you get what the supplier has to offer. That has some limitations, but it also means that you and they are much less likely to get trapped into a contractual web where everything needed is out of contract and an added (cost) extra…
mmitII 