You've heard from us for a while that your cloud, whether public or private, should not be an island. Should this be true of your public cloud provider too?

A growing number of service providers are jumping into the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market not by building their own solution but by jumpstarting the effort with a cloud platform software provider like VMware, OnApp or CA. The benefits of this approach:

• Faster time to market
• Less R&D expense
• In some cases brand equity
• Potentially greater enterprise compatibility
• And somewhat being part of a network of compatible providers