Interview with Al Sadowski, Research Vice President

In May, we opened registration for our 15^th annual Hosting & Cloud Transformation Summit, and the response has been incredible! We are excited to bring our leading insights on disruptive and innovative technologies back to Las Vegas. With two months to go before showtime, we will start by introducing our presenting analysts and their session topics through a new series of Q&As.

First up, Research Vice President Al Sadowski:

Q: What will you be discussing in this session?

A: The title of my session is “Voice of the Service Provider: How do Service Providers Stack Up?” I’ll be sharing insights into how service providers are transforming their own businesses in order to remain relevant in the eyes of enterprises. Supported by our latest survey data, the session will go into detail about differentiation strategies, budgets and spending comparisons, and product roadmaps. The session will be followed by a panel discussion with a few hardware and software vendors focused on enabling service providers with enterprise-facing products, along with service provider best practices.

Q: Why is this topic significant?

A: Service providers are no longer just purveyors of compute and storage; they are now seen as partners for services beyond basic infrastructure and as key allies in hybrid architectures. But nearly all have a long way to go in order to automate and affordably scale a business that can provide reliable, secure and performance products and services. According to our Voice of the Service Provider: Infrastructure Evolution 2019 survey results, 94% of service providers admit their IT environments will require partial or complete transformation over the next three years!

Analyst: Liam Eagle

Enterprise adoption of cloud infrastructure offerings and SaaS is accelerating, while the dominance of hyperscale providers is increasing in the public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud market. However, other service providers – including those with a history of providing managed hosting and operating infrastructure of their own – have a notable role to play in the cloud adoption process for the majority of enterprises and smaller businesses. That role is likely to include designing, managing and securing public cloud resources, as well as potentially supplementing them with private cloud resources of their own.

The nature of this role, and the degree of its significance, is supported and detailed in part by a study conducted in the first half of 2016 by 451 Research, and commissioned by Microsoft. In particular, the study results detail the nature of the cloud transformation taking place in the enterprise, and they offer insight into how service providers might take advantage of new opportunities emerging as a result. Understanding and acting on this fundamental shift will be extremely important for traditional hosting providers, as growth continues to dwindle in the core legacy facets of that business, such as shared and dedicated hosting.