Recently, it seems that IT professionals cannot turn around without seeing another industry announcement involving the word "cloud."  I am guilty too -- in fact, the SVM team at Forrester has written extensively on the topic of what cloud strategies mean to sourcing and vendor management professionals.  Cloud impacts every technology, service category, industry vertical, geography, and company size differently. But despite impressive growth in software-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service still takes a back seat to more conventional outsourcing “towers.”

My colleague, Wolfgang Benkel, and I recently published The Forrester Wave™: Global IT Infrastructure Outsourcing, but we realize there are unique regional considerations, which we covered in separate market overview reports for North America and Europe. In terms of what client references told us about what they are actually outsourcing from their IT infrastructure outsourcing providers, services like help desk, deskside, and storage management predominate, while old (which are on their way out, i.e., mainframe) and the new (which have tremendous growth potential, i.e., IaaS) technologies are among the least represented.

We will present the findings from this Wave in a teleconference on May 12, 2011. Click here to register for the teleconference now.