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In the future, companies may hook up with more than a dozen different cloud services providers. Brokers would serve as intermediaries, offering such services as customization, integration, security, and aggregation. Through 2014, cloud service brokerage will generate more than $5 billion in sales—up from less than $50 million this year—making it the fastest growing area of cloud computing, Gartner said earlier this year.
The need for brokers is compounded by the lack of standards in the cloud services industry, which means that information can't travel between different services without specially written code to translate among them. "If companies integrate it themselves, they have no hope of saving money," says Daryl Plummer, group vice-president of Gartner Research. In general, cloud services appeal to companies because they're less expensive than buying hardware and software.
...http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2010/tc2010126_515410.htm
