Cloud service partnerships could boom in 2013

Providers could marry more often to meet customer cloud service demands

Cloud service providers will seek out partnerships to offer a wider breadth of services that customers are increasingly demanding, a new report from research firm Current Analysis predicts.

The market has already seen some partnerships, but researcher Amy Larsen DeCarlo, principal analyst covering security and data center services for Current, expects to see even more alliances as customer use case requests outpace the ability of individual providers.

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Salesforce.com, considered by many as the leading software as a service (SaaS) provider, has an exchange as well for running applications -- analytics, marketing, collaboration -- on top of or alongside Salesforce.com's customer relationship management (CRM) tool.

DeCarlo expects these partnerships to continue to evolve in 2013 as customers demand services from their providers and companies realize they can better serve users through partnerships with other companies.

So should end users wait for vendors to iron out their partnership strategy before jumping into the cloud? DeCarlo says each organization is different, but generally speaking many of the partnerships being made now are about next-generation capabilities for the providers. "The fact these companies are pursuing partnerships does not indicate a problem with their service," she explains, "in many cases they're getting ahead of future customer demands. It's really a normal evolution of the market."

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.

Read more about cloud computing in Network World's Cloud Computing section.