During a second phase, the main objective of the cloud providers will be to increase their own “share of the wallet”. This will be possible for those providers who are able to expand their service portfolio and to realize even complex integration projects in their customers’ corporate architectures. An increasing number of specialized providers will form at the various stages of the value chain, and they, just as their customers, will be confronted with the decision to “build, buy, or partner” when creating their services. This means that it will become critical to the success of the providers of “higher quality” services that they design an attractive product portfolio and achieve an optimal cost structure. Successful partner management is certainly one of the key qualifications.   

The patterns which were described previously primarily for IT services also have direct relevance for the operators of communication networks. From the viewpoint of the network operators, the challenge is to enhance their product line by adding cloud-based services. Moreover, a trend in the direction of increasing convergence and virtualization of telecommunications services can also be discerned.    

By the time of the next American presidential election (2012 at the latest) cloud computing solutions will presumably have become established on the market as alternatives on a par with ICT services within the company. So the answer to the question as to whether everything will come out of the digital cloud in the future is: “No, not everything, but perhaps a lot more than we can imagine today.”