Enterprises are increasingly adopting multicloud deployment strategies, but few are seeing any benefits thanks to the growing complexity of cloud service providers’ product portfolios.

451 Research Inc.’s latest Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation Study shows there’s a growing appetite for the mix-and-match approach towards cloud services, with 69 percent of enterprises showing an interest in the model.

The research firm came to this conclusion by looking at data from a survey of 600 IT decision makers and combining it with feedback from 60,000 information technology buyers.

The report concluded that although the multicloud strategy offers benefits including lower costs and greater resiliency, most enterprises struggle to take advantage of them because of the growing range of services offered by providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc. As an example, 451 Research pointed out that AWS’s portfolio of cloud services has more than 320,000 SKUs, or product codes, with 53,000 of these added during the first two weeks of this month alone.

“Cloud buyers have access to more capabilities than ever before, but the result is greater complexity,” said Dr. Owen Rogers, research director at 451 Research. “It is a nightmare for enterprises to calculate the cost of computing using a single cloud provider, let alone comparing providers or planning a multi-cloud strategy. The cloud was supposed to be a simple utility like electricity, but new innovations and new pricing models, such as AWS Reserved Instances, mean the IT landscape is more complex than ever.”

This is no secret to the cloud providers. AWS Chief Executive Andy Jassy, for instance, has said outright that using multiple clouds in a big way doesn’t really make sense not just because of the complexity but because the economics weigh in favor of using mainly one cloud provider.

The good news is that even if the complexity is overwhelming now, an opportunity is emerging for companies that can help enterprises to broker and integrate cloud services from multiple providers, while simplifying pricing structures.

451 Research’s findings were revealed at the AWS re:invent conference taking place in Las Vegas this week, where the cloud giant might add to the complexity with a slew of new products and services. However, in recognition of that complexity, Jassy recently implied in a tweet that Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels won’t be announcing quite the same flurry of new products and instead will provide a “deep look at future of data + serverless vs being new release focused.”

The research firm also revealed that cloud has become a mainstay of most firms’ IT operations, with 90 percent of survey respondents saying they use cloud services.

451 Research also said it believes companies are losing interest in running IT on-premises, as it predicts close to 60 percent of workloads will be hosted in third-party cloud environments by 2019, up from 45 percent today.

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