Managed Service Providers and Cloud Service Providers: The Changing Dynamics of Collaborating, Competing, and Controlling

Managed Service Providers and Cloud Service Providers: The Changing Dynamics of Collaborating, Competing, and Controlling

This IDC Market Perspective discusses the changing dynamics of the roles of managed SPs as related to cloud service providers (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS). These roles are defined by the changing dynamics involving collaboration across partners, competition between managed SPs and cloud service providers, and shifting control over the relationship between customers and service providers. The result of these shifts has positioned managed SPs to provide solutions management, create ecosystem of platform providers and technology vendors, ensure stakeholder integration, and meet industry compliance and security. Cloud service providers, in their relationship to managed SPs, are increasingly positioned as driving service creation and standardization, creating an ecosystem of service providers, and enabling move to opex."Relationships across partnerships between managed SPs and cloud service providers are evolving and resulting in shifts in where they collaborate and compete as well as which type of provider clients view as controlling the primary relationship with customers," says David Tapper, program VP, Outsourcing and Managed Cloud Services at IDC. "Ensuring success as a managed SP will require that managed SPs create a dynamic road map of responsibilities with cloud service providers, define evolution of automation, build extensive and adaptable partnership ecosystem, develop an "intelligent" multicloud management platform for service delivery, make analytics core to provisioning of services, and establish separate, independent business unit for new business models."

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