Analyst Advisory Firm Launches Study Of Cloud Business Services

Horses for Sources (HfS), a Middletown, N.J., analyst advisory firm covering business process outsourcing (BPO) and information technology outsourcing (ITO), has launched a study to understand the dynamics and intentions of enterprises to adopt Cloud Computing models.

The Outsourcing Unit at the London School of Economics (LSE) will work with the HfS analyst team to interpret the data and produce a seminal industry report on the study findings that will discuss the impact of Cloud on the future of work.

HfS will collect adoption intentions and attitudes towards Cloud Business Services across both business and IT professionals.

Key dynamics being surveyed will include those aspects of Cloud that appeal to both business and IT professionals, inhibitors that are holding back adoption, current intentions and future plans, intended use of third party service providers and consultants, and determination of specific organization functions where Cloud will have the most impact.

Comment from CEO of HfS Research, Phil Fersht: There's been so much noise focused on the technology implications of Cloud, and not enough attention placed on how business executives intend to apply Cloud services within their own business environments. At the end of the day, some firms will succeed in driving down IT infrastructure costs using Cloud models, but the real momentum will come from the business processes that can be delivered to organizations that have all the associated application workflow and infrastructure already provisioned in the Cloud. This study will be the first in industry to draw out these dynamics to help us visualize the future of work.

Comment from Professor Leslie Willcocks, Professor of Technology Work and Globalisation at the LSE: In our 2002 book Netsourcing, we predicted a strong move towards renting applications, services and infrastructure over the Net. It seemed to peter out with the bursting of the e-business bubble but in fact we are now witnessing the ten year convergence of streams of technology and capability that pose the question: how do we leverage this strategically for business advantage? That is one thing we want to investigate. The other is the longer game -- is this going to be a dominant trend, the only game in town, or, if not, what sort of hybrid futures are likely?

Contact: http://www.horsesforsources.com