Why the market is driving toward new “flavors” that challenge the standard “vanilla”
CIO Dive’s recent article titled, “Big Cloud Players May Get the Hype, But They Aren’t For Everyone,” makes a bold statement about future shifts in the cloud landscape. It is exactly the change-up we expected as the cloud market matures and the technology evolves
According to Lydia Leong, Vice President and Analyst at Gartner, “It’s not so much there are new niche vendors, it’s that the niche vendors continue to survive, even in the face of significant consolidation around just a few vendors – those niche vendors typically do something that the other vendors don’t do as well.“
What’s Driving the Change-Up from Big Players to Niche Providers?
- Flexibility – Private Label Public Cloud providers can offer a greater level of flexibility; whereas, the Big Cloud Players lock potential customers into a t-shirt sized solution that they define based on their individual market criteria, not customer-driven and customized.
- Cost – Private Label Public Cloud providers can offer a lower cost model, especially in the event that a customer has a need for a Hybrid Cloud and their Private On/Off Premise Cloud needs to connect to a flexible lower cost model. In this case, customers can take advantage of an as-a-Service delivery model, which facilitates access to a custom hybrid cloud solution. This gives the customer the best combination of cloud technologies for their specific workloads without the headache of building a solution from the ground up.
- Multi-Cloud Strategy – Private Label Cloud providers can provide a Multi-Cloud Strategy; whereas the big cloud players can only offer their flavor. A Multi-Cloud strategy allows customers to leverage the best-of-breed approach for their individual path to digital transformation. This allows customers an opportunity to get the best fit for their needs vs. being shoe-horned into a commodity product.
Ultimately, it’s the customer’s choice. Vanilla will always satisfy in some scenarios. However, as IT modernization speeds along, it means different things for every customer and everyone’s “tastes” are different. There’s a world of options beyond the big cloud players that can offer a more rewarding and successful path to modernization. I’ve always appreciated a 31-flavors approach. And Cloud is no different.