Daryl Plummer and Frank Kenny from Gartner have been writing about cloud brokering for the past few months. eWeek covered their research and James Urquart blogged about this yesterday.
There is clearly a need for cloud brokering technology and probably a business around cloud brokers. Cloud brokers will be a combination of the support (think Rackspace’s fanatical support), technology (Sonoa and others will be technology providers) and consulting (networking and application level setup – even if it is just of SLA’s etc.). Cloud brokers will also need to understand how to sell and service enterprise customers. Telcos might step up, but others like pure consulting companies (cognizant, infosys) and possibly product/services companies like IBM, HP and even Cisco might want to capitalize on this opportunity.
Cloud brokering technology and brokers serve a real need. the drum beat is going to increase as cloud computing takes hold in enterprises.
