Recent events (economic, technological, business) maybe driving the convergence of two traditionally separate sources of value in the managed services or outsourcing world, specialized knowledge, and scale. Although some organizations have traditionally applied both specialized knowledge and scale, it was far more common for smaller service providers to compete on specialized knowledge — with higher infrastructure costs, and larger firms to compete mostly on scale, with less specialized knowledge and focus than their smaller rivals.
But recent research and trends, including some highlighted here , show that the advent of cloud computing, and large commodity cloud service providers, may allow specialized managed services providers to focus and still provide compelling scale in the infrastructure. Referred to as "ADAMs" by Gartner (Alternative Delivery Models), these providers leverage not just Cloud architectures, but also Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms.
And there is no reason why this has to be only a two-tier model! I recently posted a link via Twitter, Facebook, etc regarding a beta-service called CloudMQ . This service — though not commercial yet — may be a leading indicator. It aims to offer standards based (JMS, or Java Messaging Service), business grade messaging (guaranteed delivery, etc) "in the cloud" (offered to customers via the internet). So far, this sounds normal enough, until you realize the entire service is hosted on Amazon's EC2 and S3 services, which are themselves infrastructure services! And we are only at the start of this.
Commercial services like Amazon change the economics, and when the economics change, the models quickly follow…
2 Responses to “Cloud computing may change outsourcing/BPO”
I think web-services messages are most likely to be used over the net (i am not sure jms is).
I think Amazon SQS or OnlineMQ.com are focus in this direction as it seems more logical to SMB’s connecting application over the web.
The need for an accessible, managed and cost effective infrastructure drives the demand and cloud scalability is what makes offerings like cloudMQ possible at a cost much cheaper than DIY.