WSJ has an article on companies buying from Amazon Web Services instead of from a server vendor.

The Lafayette, La., company, has been shifting a growing proportion of its computing chores to computers operated by Amazon.com Inc. AMZN +0.65% In the past year, Schumacher purchased just one server from Hewlett-Packard Co., HPQ -0.04%says Douglas Menefee, Schumacher's chief information officer.

Five years ago, the company may have bought 50 such servers for as much as $12,000 apiece. "We don't really buy hardware anymore," says Mr. Menefee.

End users are dumping the old way of buying IT hardware then attempting the integration in-house or with IT services. Users in the past were so happy it worked whether it was efficient and effective was many times not an issue. Remember when you had a performance problem and the answer was to upgrade or buy more hardware?

Now end user want IT services that have been marketed by amazon.com, google, microsoft, salesforce, and others. Enterprises want Big Data environments and high performance compute (HPC) solutions. Here is an example of one solution for those who want to buy IT gear, but want an integrated deployed solution.