Small and mid-sized businesses across the Americas are making bold moves to the cloud as a way to compete with larger enterprises, according to a new report published today by Information Services Group (ISG), a leading global technology research and advisory firm.

The ISG Provider Lens Cloud Transformation/Operation Services & XaaS Report - Pan America finds many large enterprises are struggling to exchange their "legacy crown jewel" IT systems for more innovative business models. But smaller businesses see the cloud as offering them easily available and affordable tools, including analytics and cognitive computing, the report said.

"Infrastructure costs and access to technology were once barriers to competition, but the cloud allows access to a broad range of software, platforms and services," said Esteban Herrera, partner and global leader of ISG Research.

The latest ISG Provider Lens report covers cloud service provision in 17 markets across the Americas. Besides the developed markets of the U.S. and Canada, the report also covers nine South American countries, four Central American countries and Mexico. These developing markets face difficulties in funding technology investments, the report notes, but cloud services "free enterprises from costly infrastructure investment and allow companies of any size to improve production and, in the long term, improve economic equality."

Many large enterprises are adopting a hybrid cloud model because of the difficulty of migrating some legacy systems to the cloud, the report finds. Enterprises are also seeing benefits from using platform-as-a-service offerings from specialized providers. For large, complex enterprises, the full benefit of moving to the cloud comes from application transformation, the report notes.

Meanwhile, many midmarket companies are moving to a single cloud. They are seeing the benefit of moving to software-as-a-service, including SaaS ERP and CRM to replace legacy corporate solutions.  

The report finds significant cost savings for companies that move operations to the cloud. In many cases, the savings came from provisioning automation, from infrastructure reliability, and from improvements to the software release and change management processes, including the introduction of robust DevOps practices. In case studies where cost savings were identified, the average savings was 38 percent.

The report also finds a growing reliance on cloud consulting services, because businesses can't keep up with the complexity and the thousands of offerings released every year by the hyperscale and other public cloud providers. "The flood of innovation makes it extremely important that businesses receive guidance," Herrera said.

The ISG Provider Lens Cloud Transformation/Operation Services & XaaS Report for Pan America evaluates the capabilities of 24 cloud transformation and XaaS providers across four quadrants: Public Cloud Transformation, Managed Public Cloud Services, iPaaS - Public Cloud Hyperscaler and IaaS - Enterprise Cloud.

IBM was named a Leader in all four quadrants, while Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant and TCS were named a Leader in two. Atos, AWS, DXC Technology, Google, Microsoft Azure, Tech Mahindra, TIVIT and Wipro were all a Leader in one quadrant.