Jamcracker Report Shows How Customers are Leveraging Cloud Brokers

Maybe it's starting to sound like a cliche, but businesses are increasingly turning to cloud computing for their IT needs. A report from Jamcracker, which offers a cloud services brokerage software platform, reinforces that fact, and according to the study, small and medium enterprises are finding themselves working with cloud services brokers more frequently to fulfill their businesses' needs.

Jamcracker's third report on cloud adoption and usage found an explosion of cloud services in recent years. That's hardly new, as a few years ago, nobody had heard of the cloud, and then it became major top-of-mind topic—increasingly so, as we all know. But the survey also looked at segments of cloud, finding that SaaS is the largest cloud adoption segment, followed by IaaS.

It's a little self-serving, of course, but Jamcracker's report found that small and medium enterprises more and more are turning to cloud services brokers for their cloud adoption needs. Not that it's all that surprising, as cloud brokers have the ability to vet services for best-of-breed before recommending them to their customers. Cloud brokers really fulfill the trusted adviser role and help customers select the best cloud services for their needs.

Large enterprises are turning to internal cloud services broker deployment models, according to the study. Jamcracker also noted that collaboration and messaging applications accounted for almost 50 percent cloud sales, "suggesting organizations are consuming services that accommodate the 'bring your own device' and mobile workforce trends."

A few of the key findings include:

• Cloud services brokers experienced on average doubled year-over-year growth in 2012. Part of this was due to an expanded focus beyond market trials and the ramping up of cloud services sales and marketing activities.
• There's a trend toward cloud providers seeking distribution partners to grow their ecosystems and increase their opportunities.
• The cloud services broker model is gaining increased attention at the enterprise and government levels.
• Cloud services brokers are finding a significant portion of their business in the messaging applications area (noted by 27 percent of respondents), followed closely by collaboration applications (22 percent) and business applications (18 percent). The remaining sales are made up by infrastructure, backup and storage, security and miscellaneous applications. BYOD is driving the popularity of collaboration and messaging apps.
• For 2013, the cloud services broker model is expected to quickly expand into mainstream service providers, telcos, IT distributors and ISV ecosystems. There are also pilots going on in enterprises and government IT organizations, which Jamcracker expects to lead to a full embrace of the model for 2014.

"A key trend in the second half of 2012, continuing into 2013, is how rapidly interest is building within enterprise and government IT sectors to leverage the internal CSB model as a means to aggregate the delivery and lifecycle management of IaaS and SaaS within their organizations," said Steve Crawford, Jamcracker's vice president of Marketing and Business Development, in a prepared statement.