The market is changing fast and more and more enterprises are changing how the buy and consume IT infrastructure.   Instead of owning all components of their IT, enterprises are increasingly heading into the cloud.  Even for infrastructure services.  So service providers need to listen up and meet enterprises where they are.

So what did our research turn up?

It turned up lessons for every company looking to offer infrastructure-as-a-service.  Large enterprises will be as demanding as ever.    They’re be a lot of scrutiny on their new cloud infrastructure service offerings.

Different Size Enterprises, Different Enterprise Buyer Habits for Cloud Infrastructure

Specifically, large enterprises basically told us everything is important. Only 3% separate the top ranked item from the bottom.

In fact, in order of important, this is what large enterprises expect

1. Volume discounts
2. Proactive alerts for maintenance outages
3. Broad option of management tools for self-service
4. Range of service and support options
5. Large scale services to support our scale
6. Pricing that goes up and down with our usage
7. Service level agreements

Medium-sized companies had a different order of priorities though.

1. Proactive alerts for maintenance outage
2. Range of service and support options
3. Large scale services to support our scale
4. Service level agreements
5. Broad option of management tools for self-service
6. Volume discounts
7. Pricing that goes up and down with our usage

While volume pricing was tops for large enterprise, medium-sized companies put pricing last.  Service agreements are not the highest priority for large enterprise, though.  We think this indicates the pace that large enterprises will take to embrace cloud infrastructure services.

They’ll go slow, test, and work out the kinks.  We expect that they’ll likely use services that extend service reach or improve network performance in places where it just simply has not been cost-effective to do that.  For example, using load balancing infrastructure services or storage extension services gives huge performance benefits that would be otherwise very expensive to get with their own deployed gear.

With changing buying habits come changes in how vendors reach buyers. They use more social media, rely on vendor users groups and listen less to analysts. Network operators need to listen up and pay attention to changes in how customers are influenced and how they buy.

To reach more on changing enterprise buyer habits for cloud infrastructure, and how they change buying strategies, head to the Brocade blog. You can check it out here:  http://goo.gl/qxMHJ