2011: The Year your provider vies to be your service integrator. Will you play ball?

What’s your New Year’s resolution? Watching Service Integration too, we bet…

HfS analyst Euan Davis, fresh from his recent escapades with Cloud Business Services, is dedicating 2011 to exploring the synergies created by the acceleration of Cloud Computing and Service Integration. His journey begins with a look at an “intriguing” partnership just inked between Logica and Microsoft… over to you, Mr Davis

So what’s your New Year’s resolution beyond enjoying yourself less and working more? Mine is to shape the debate around Cloud and watch how some IT services firms morph into “Service Integrators.”

Looks like I am in good company too, as I hear Europe’s Logica begins its New Year by inking an intriguing partnership with Microsoft. What, at first glance, looks like a rather mundane partnership really signals something else: That its going to be the business driving Cloud—Logica gets this and so does Microsoft. And each needs the other.

Our latest report shows Cloud Services triggering potentially large-scale business transformations and opening up demand for new operating models as firms look to source, rather than build for Cloud. But who’s going to integrate the services? Will it be the internal IT shop making the complex integration across cloud based services and applications work? My take is that those IT shops that can’t quite cut the mustard face a tough choice—learn how to do it quickly, get someone else to do it, or end their days as a cost centre managed out of existence.

The larger system integrators (like Logica and its peers) are betting that you, the buyer, will look to them to be your “Service Integrator.” That means they get to work with you to set-up and monitor an operating model with each step in the service delivery process mapped out and marked as it crosses out to the Cloud and back again, process by sub-process, right down to the data packet itself. Microsoft’s platform-as-a-service offering Azure certainly helps here with the architecture but Logica is in the driving seat to make Cloud a reality with its customers through its domain expertise and a collaborative DNA (must be its weirdly Nordic DNA) that pulls in a wider ISV community that can innovate and create cloud enabled industry solutions to solve business process problems. My research points towards business thinking the same way about service integration as it makes its journey to cloud—governance, transformation and change management are in the bag of tricks that business executives are looking for to make Cloud a reality—check out what sort of third-party support they are looking, from our recent cloud report: