Cloud providers will likely benefit from greater customer flexibility to migrate workloads and data to competitors, by eliminating fear of lock-in as a barrier to cloud adoption. Just as airlines (try to) ensure proper baggage handling, “reliable application transport” in the Intercloud will ensure that data and applications are correctly transferred across providers.
Cross-provider bundles and workflows would benefit from Intercloud standards and mechanisms as well. Today, tour operators (“aggregators”) put together hotel, airline, train, bus, and cruise ship services into a single bundle (say, “The Mediterranean Like You’ve Never Seen It Before”) and manage the flow of customers across those services (the helpful people guiding travelers from baggage claim to the bus that takes them to the cruise ship). Complex information technology applications and “mash-ups,” requiring, say, credit card validation and billing, scanned-image-to-text optical character recognition, secure messaging and the like, could be composed from base services offered by a variety of best-in-breed operators.
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