As we discussed in our first blog of our cloud infrastructure study, the market is changing fast with big changes in how enterprises consume IT.  More and more, we see new enterprise buying strategies for cloud 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.

But back to our marketing research, what customer insights did it turn up?

With changing infrastructure delivery, come new enterprise buying strategies for cloud infrastructure.

Different Size Enterprises, Different Enterprise Buying Strategies for Cloud Infrastructure

Specifically, again large enterprises basically told us everything is non-negotiable and important.

Large enterprise wants to outsource infrastructure or IaaS to as few vendors as possible.  Nearly 71% said that this is a key objective for them.  And not surprisingly, more than 72% trust larger cloud services vendors than larger ones – when it comes to security, at least.

In addition, 69% of large enterprises expect to have top management very involved in deciding exactly which vendors they will trust.

Research also showed the continuing acceptance of open standards.  71% of large enterprises will only go with a cloud services that support a broad range of open standards.

Medium-sized companies followed the same trends except for one.  Only 27% of them said they will only go with a cloud infrastructure services vendor that supports open standards.  This is certainly a large disparity between them.

However, in our experience, it’s only a matter of time.  With open standards being so important to the top of the market, sooner or later open standards with catch fire with smaller enterprises.  Big technology vendors are in for some big changes, no doubt.  If proprietary gear becomes less attractive to customer, giants are at serious risk.  Of course, these hardware companies won’t disappear overnight, but they certainly won’t grow either.

Anyway, to read more on changing enterprise buying strategies for cloud infrastructure, head to the Brocade blog.  You can check it out here:  http://goo.gl/qxMHJ