IDC has released a list of top cloud professional services vendors and you may be surprised who’s off the list.
Market research firm IDC determines the list based on 2014 analysis of worldwide cloud professional services vendors. The IDC MarketScape report utilizes a scoring methodology that produces a graphical assessment of each vendor’s current market capabilities as well as strategies for competing in the future.
The Framingham, Mass.-based IDC broke the vendors down into two categories: leaders and major players.
There were only four in the leaders section: Accenture, HCL Technologies, IBM, and PwC.
The secondary Major Players lists has a cross section of companies from systems integrators to networking vendors to service providers and software vendors. They are: Cognizant, Wipro, Infosys, Microsoft, EMC, Cisco, Capgemini, NTT DATA, Unisys, and HP.
According to IDC, a component of the evaluation is the inclusion of the perception of cloud professional services buyers of both the key characteristics and the capabilities of these providers.
“When buyers were asked what characteristics were required for a cloud professional services project to be successful, at a worldwide level, the number one characteristic was ‘provide technical insights and competence’ followed by ‘provide functional insights and competence’,” said Gard Little, research director, IT Consulting and Systems Integration Services for IDC.
“These two items made it to the top of the 2014 list compared with 2013 when ‘meet the project timeline’ and ‘ability to handle changes in project scope’ were tops, indicating buyers believe success will come less from basic project management skills and more from technical and/or functional insights.”
Cloud is a word that’s been thrown around a lot lately – but it’s also a great opportunity for the channel. Still, there are some unique challenges to operating and selling cloud services, and we want to tackle your questions about them in a conversation online.
CDN is holding a Twitter chat on Thursday, Aug. 28 at 1 p.m. ET, running until 2 p.m., at the hashtag #CDNCloud. If you’re on Twitter, we’d love it if you joined us!
Related Stories
Absent from the list are perennial leaders as cloud services providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google, Rackspace and Oracle.
The trouble with these kinds of lists specifically with cloud is that the category is too segmented as you can have a list of top Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud vendors and another one for top Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) vendors. You can slice it even further with cloud storage providers and apps providers.
Then there are a whole slew of service providers starting with companies such as AT&T and CenturyLink Technologies that provide cloud services.
The IDC list of top cloud services providers seems to be heavily weighted towards big integrators and consulting firms.