Paradigm shifts are inflection points, and like NASCAR cars going into a sharp curve, some don’t make the turn very well. It’s a chance for a bit player to shine, and there’s the potential risk for an established player to stumble. Datamation notes that this could happen to the hosting industry as we move to cloud computing. No longer can you just set up a bunch of servers and call it a business. It will be the services they offer that make the difference between survival and going out of business.
For the past decade, hosting companies have made a comfortable living offering relatively undifferentiated (i.e., ‘vanilla’) services to a wide array of corporate customers. Now, the rapid growth of cloud computing is changing the competitive landscape and resetting customer expectations for hosting services.
Traditional hosted and managed storage, web hosting and application management services have enabled small- and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), as well as large-scale enterprises, to augment their in-house datacenters with off-site, third-party facilities to either offset their costs or accelerate their deployment.