Europe's enterprises will spend big on cloud consulting and migration according to estimates from analyst IDC, reaching $8.2bn being spent by 2015.

This represents a giant leap from the $560m spent in 2010 and it driven by early adopters already putting bigger migration plans in place to move applications to private or public clouds.

"The early adopters typically started using cloud solutions in parallel with their existing IT, but in 2010 we have seen more companies starting to migrate existing solutions to the cloud and to create roadmap for future migration,"said Research Director Mette Ahorlu, of IDC's European services group. "We don't expect everything to go to the cloud, but the early adopters are likely to move a majority of their IT to cloud within the next five years, and the vast majority will follow suit within a few years. The new IT environments will have elements of traditional IT, private cloud, and public cloud, and management and integration will become a challenge for which European enterprises will typically choose to hire an external service provider, driving further growth in the cloud professional services market."

As much as 25% of cloud professional services will be delivered as part of outsourcing contracts.

This has a major influence on the choice of provider for professional services as well as for cloud services: the provider needs to be able to manage both the traditional and the new environment under one contract and needs to be able to migrate larger parts to the new environment during the life of the contract.

"There is a huge migration and integration task ahead, which is good news for service providers, who can expect their traditional revenue to start falling because cloud services are so standardized. Even consulting and migration are standardized and therefore cheaper than traditional consulting and integration services. This is also very good news for the customers ' they will get more value for money,"said Ahorlu. "Some believe that cloud is just plug and play, but that is not the case for the more complicated existing or new solutions. So professional services will not go away, but they will change and in the longer run beyond 2015 ' when migration is complete ' account for a much smaller proportion of IT costs.

"Another important point is that service providers need to prepare for the rapidly growing request for cloud professional services and have the resources available. Right now, demand is mainly for business cases and roadmaps, requiring both business competence and architectural competence, but on a limited scale. But in a just slightly longer time frame, most if not all consultants need to understand cloud. Vendors have substantial investments ahead of them in creating the necessary capabilities to support this rapidly evolving market."