The following is an excerpt of 4Sight, 451 Research's newly-released research framework. In the coming months, we'll be releasing a series of Spotlights on 4Sight and its major themes--Invisible Infrastructure, Pervasive Intelligence, Universal Risk and Contextual Experience.
William Fellows, Founder & Research Vice President, Cloud
John Abbott, Founder & Distinguished Analyst
Al Sadowski, Research Vice President, Voice of the Service Provider
In the course of two decades, the hardware layer of infrastructure has mostly commodified, with the value shifting to software and services; consequently, to the consumers, the actual infrastructure itself – the place where logic is processed and data is stored – is less relevant. As long as it is secure, compliant, reliable, available on demand and cost-effective, they are happy. To the end consumer, the underlying infrastructure is almost entirely invisible. Service providers of all types have to automate service delivery and process – infrastructure is an afterthought at this point – and continually improve their speed and efficiency of reliable, repeatable, profitable services. The cloud era's consumption-based, service-driven, retail model discipline is the engine of transformation.
According to 451 Research's Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud, Hosting and Managed Services, Budgets and Outlook 2017, enterprises cite moving workloads off-premises as the top reason for increasing IT budgets – the clear beneficiary of this transition to hosted applications being hosters and public cloud providers. Every company is becoming a service provider, and software is the new hardware in the digital enterprise. Consequently, service providers will need to raise their software IQs in order to remain relevant.