'Plumbing as a Service': why not?

ZDNet
My colleague Phil Wainewright recently posted details about Appirio, a service that Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer is calling a cloud service brokerage. As Phil put it: “Appirio has packaged up the plumbing between cloud applications and is offering the plumbing as a service, on the same ready-to-run, pay-as-you-go terms as the applications themselves.”