New services are springing up, benefiting hosting and network services providers that need a way to spruce up their offerings. Partnerships are inevitable between the infrastructure and management services providers. Carrier-grade service platforms are being offered commercially to support management services. They integrate management services with infrastructure, and include such components as provisioning and billing. This will help turn resource and applications management into an operationally viable business.
Hosted integration is a growing service type.
Rather than internally integrate their own applications by developing, then maintaining, their own interfaces using enterprise application integration toolsets, a new option for enterprises is to subscribe to a value-added service for outsourcing the integration functions. Those are the trends we see from within the industry. Presidents and stock market cycles will come and go, but the logic of service development dates back at least 30 years within the telecom industry, and maybe even further back than that. Giotto Perspectives, based in Boston, MA, is an industry analysis and consulting firm engaged in work on application services. The current Giotto Perspectives APM Report is on the emerging set of application performance management technologies and services.