The analyst house stresses that IT companies need to "bridge legacy offerings and new services" - again pointing a future to the cloud for service providers.

And cloud services appear to be growing at a much quicker rate than other elements of the IT services market. Hardware and software support will grow slowly compared to IaaS and BPaaS (business process as a service), which will grow 13.1 percent and 47.3 percent in 2013, respectively, according to Gartner.

There are three recommendations Gartner has for service providers this year; stopping undifferentiated marketing messages, emphasizing business value to "transform clients' existing operations"; improving service delivery by reinventing the service portfolio; and determining whether a business model is based on scale or specialization.

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