Lack of investment in external connectivity impedes access to the expanding range of services available from third-party providers. Although ownership is the norm today, the shift towards accessing computing as a service is already under way. Enterprises will want providers to be able to manage services throughout their entire computing infrastructure, within a contract framework that holds them wholly accountable for the quality of access users experience. Once confidence in the service provider model has been fully established, ownership will ultimately be seen as a high-risk option of last resort, best left to the infrastructure and application service providers whose core business is the provision of computing services. Providers Infrastructure providers undertake a high-risk business.
High margins are available only in the early years of innovation.
Since infrastructure aims to be efficient, it always converges on commodity architectures. For providers at the application layer, striking the right balance between access and assets will be a crucial success factor. They must maximize their openness to third-party services to be able to access the innovations of others as soon as they become available. Equally, they must make their own services as accessible as possible to others. In a connected world, investment in infrastructure assets is always at risk of being devalued by the advent of innovative new services that supplant some or all of their functionality at a lower cost of access.