What is the consumer’s biggest confusion about IT as a service?

Some of the confusion in the marketplace is driven by the multitude of choices out there. One can consume services these days at very different levels. Are they looking for a service that is support-oriented? Are they looking for a service that is application-oriented? The best way to clarify some of that confusion would be to have the buyer start by defining their strategies and which core competencies they want to keep in house, what they want to build, keep and know from the ground up. Then they need to assess what core competencies can be outsourced to a service provider model. Then they can make decisions along that spectrum.

That way, expectations get set clearly and early on in a relationship between the buyer and the service provider. But there are a lot of choices and part of what CIO’s and IT departments are grappling with now are sourcing strategies that have changed in nature. Traditional sourcing strategies used to be a choice between vendors or an option of operating systems and applications.

More and more, sourcing strategies are built around how to acquire the IT services needed to drive the business. Are they built, bought or partnered? Should a company go with a dedicated infrastructure or with the cloud? They're looking at things from a different perspective, which is much more business service-oriented than it is technology stack-oriented, which is driving a lot of intelligent decision-making in the business.

Most large enterprises today have some notion of hybrid models. They have partial services procured in a true IT service model, and they still have infrastructure applications they are building and operating themselves. Even with these infrastructures, more and more, the market is moving toward everything as a service.