So what is the impact of IBM's acquisition of SoftLayer? This analyst believes this acquisition may be a fundamental signal to competitors that the old world of outsourcing is fading and that the only way to the future is delivery of services via an "IT" utility called the cloud. Just consider that 80% of U.S. buyers indicate that they will have transformed 50% of their IT environment to a cloud by 2017 and that they will not have all the resources to manage their own cloud.Tapper also covers a good history of IBM getting into “utility computing,” all the way back to 2000-ish, if not 1957.
I met and talked with Tapper at the recent Dell analyst event. I liked him a lot: he was pretty much as abrasive/honest as the UK analysts! As in this piece, what I like is people who bring the full, shaggy-dog context to what seems like a point in time in the IT industry continuum.