Executive Summary

The rapid expansion of the cloud ecosystem over the years has witnessed the evolution of various categories of vendors, who bring their own distinguished sets of offerings to the cloud table. With the growing complexities in cloud delivery models that are being adopted by enterprise buyers, it is evident that the transformational needs of the enterprise buyer community cannot be addressed by only providing buyers access to the right cloud technology and enablement tools.

The multiple complex environments of enterprise buyers often warrant a far more customized approach from cloud solution providers, to ensure that integration and deployment is not only seamless, but also tailored to the client’s specific requirements and existing environment.

IT service providers and System Integrators (SI) are well placed to address these specific requirements of enterprise buyers. These service providers, through their design and consulting services, facilitate enterprise adoption not only by providing integration and customization services, but also by providing downstream management of cloud environments.

This report will benefit buyers in understanding the role played by service providers and system integrators within the cloud landscape and the key considerations to be kept in mind while selecting partner SIs. System integrators have varying levels of expertise across the consult-build-deploy-manage spectrum of cloud services, and are focusing on building capabilities and solutions across workloads, cloud layers, and industry verticals. This report is also useful for cloud technology owners as they build their SI partnership strategies.

The key themes explored in the report are:

• How the system integrators have positioned themselves within the cloud ecosystem.
• Differentiating themes for system integrators.
• How can enterprise buyers identify the right system integrators for their cloud adoption needs?