As consumers, we gravitate to any retailer that personalizes our experience. Netflix and Amazon did it with recommendations and others are following suit. My twelve-year-old son and I recently got new Garmin smart-watches for Christmas -the Forerunner 620 and 630. We created workout plans, set our goals and now we can automatically track our runs on a mobile app and web portal. Our workout stats are automatically uploaded to the cloud via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. My son has improved to a 5:40 minute mile with the personalized workout plans and feedback that he gets. I have received more health incentive credits towards my health insurance in the last 3 months than I had over the previous 6 months. That is because the app automatically uploads my workouts to Cisco's Redbrick healthcare cloud. Now, that is personalized service at its best. The service is fast to setup, seamless to navigate and easy to use. And this is the kind of personalization and simplicity businesses want from their service providers.

On our last ITaaS blog, we shared with you some of the highlights from our recent ITaaS study we conducted with AMI-partners. We summarized what IT decision makers from across the globe expect from their ICT services. The verdict is they expect to get the same type of personalization and flexibility as the services they consume at home. And this can be attributed to the fact that IT decision makers often bring a "consumer mindset" with them when making IT purchasing decisions. In fact, the research shows that a significant proportion of global SMBs and LEs want the IT services they purchase to be flexible and scalable (67%) as well as easy to order and self-provision (65%).

One of the immediate opportunities for service providers to deliver on the promise of IT services simplicity and flexibility is Cloud VPN. Cloud VPN makes ordering and signup easy on a portal. The service is activated, provisioned and scaled dynamically. This simplicity will open up a new, untapped market for service providers. The study shows that SPs will see a$7.6B Cloud VPN opportunity globally. We have summarized these key findings and your opportunity in regional whitepapers.

If you want to learn more, we have analysts from AMI-Partners share key findings of the ITaaS SDN/NFV study in a webinar on April 6, 2016. Please sign-up to hear details from the study. We will also share with you details about the Cisco cloud VPN solution and orchestration platform.

We also have a Monetization models online to help you understand your opportunity. So check out MOI, or browse through the highlights. Let us know what you think ([email protected]). If you want to learn more, please contact us or your Cisco representative.

Watch this video to learn more about Cisco MOI.