Cloud is a journey, not a destination. And it’s a journey to deliver successful business outcomes. Enterprises are utilizing an array of different types of service providers to meet their business and IT objectives. Cloud service providers and managed service providers (SPs) are core to this strategy.

However, while organizations engage with cloud SPs and managed SPs for the uniqueness of their capabilities and the value each can provide, they increasingly seek to leverage the synergies of cloud SPs and managed SPs by combining them into a seamless value chain of services.

The result for enterprises is a portfolio of service providers that they can mix and match to obtain the right set of services needed to align with specific IT needs and business outcomes. 

To optimize the value of cloud SPs and managed SPs as part of an ecosystem of service providers to meet critical business and IT objectives, enterprises should take the following actions:

• Define the role of each service provider clearly to ensure access to the best-fit set of capabilities based on provider core competencies and competitive advantages
• Leverage synergies across service providers where there are complementary capabilities that can be used to achieve a common outcome
• Ensure flexibility in being able to add and remove service providers to support aligning with dynamic changes in the market
• Implement robust governance and management capabilities to orchestrate and effectively manage across communities of service providers