The Age of Consumption

Cloud has moved beyond being simply a technology and has transformed into a way of doing business. Enterprises can increasingly consume IT without the constraints of having to build and maintain its underlying infrastructure. Opportunities for service providers are seemingly boundless in this new age of consumption, but the rising tide will not lift all boats.

It is now critical that service providers understand the role that economics will play in actualizing their full potential. Pricing is a science often treated as an art, and successful providers will use it as a competitive weapon. Partner strategies will also be instrumental for success, since no single provider can do everything, and while much has been done to simplify infrastructure for the enterprise, service providers will need even more sophisticated tools in order to profitably manage their own infrastructure for increasing demand and increasing performance. As IoT and AI drive pervasive intelligence, new deployment models (from the edge to the core) will need to optimize where workloads are executed.

The business opportunities are plentiful – but only for those who are smart, quick and strategic enough to pursue them. As Louis Pasteur famously noted, "Fortune favors the prepared mind."