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By 2015, the cloud will become the preferred mechanism for software delivery, which means organizations everywhere will have more choices when selecting an application provider, and fewer reasons to maintain their own applications on-premise.

Compare that to 2012. Today, if you use on-premise business application suites like SAP or Oracle, you’re effectively tied to those applications.

But not so in 2015. By then, you’ll be able to be selective when it comes to components. In fact, that level of selectivity is already becoming commonplace: Today, organizations everywhere are moving away from big packaged business suites, and toward best-of-breed components for their CRM and HR applications (e.g., Salesforce and Workday, respectively).

But the organization’s new advantage of increased selectivity puts a burden on the IT department to manage multiple vendors, transforming their role from providers of on-premise services to managers of off-premise cloud applications. The increased complexity IT will have to manage will be substantial and will add new dimensions to their role. IT will have to be ready and able to:

• Work with different types of providers
• Enforce a host of widely disparate SLAs
• Evaluate varying levels of performance
• Prepare for different disaster-recovery scenarios
• Implement a variety of support and escalation processes
• Accommodate different subscription and billing models (whether transaction- or api-based).

Not all IT departments will be ready to manage this level of broadened responsibility, so they’ll consolidate all of their multiple vendor agreements with one of the many cloud brokers we can expect to appear on the scene – intermediaries who will integrate various applications and services, aggregate it all to create a single view, and manage the service vendors on behalf of the IT department.

We can even expect that cloud brokers may end up doing going beyond vendor-agreement stewardship, to provide value-added services as well.

For example, it is not at all out of the question to expect that cloud brokers will map the data collected across the services their client organization has charged them to manage, integrate it with free services like Google Maps, and empower the client’s HR department to get a better idea of how the organization’s employees are spread out around the world – which could then inspire new, previously inconceivable tactics for employee-enablement initiatives.

The writing is on the wall: 2015 will mark the end of the cloud’s lengthy foreword and the start of its first chapter, and it will be exciting to witness, in 2013 and 2014, which organizations won’t be able to resist flipping to page one.

(This post was first published at http:blogs.axway.com)