Have your cake and eat it, too.

This is how I describe the trend towards the IT enterprises. 

Imagine two different three layer cakes, with each layer being different.

You guessed it.  The top layer is SaaS, the Middle layer is PaaS, and the bottom later is IaaS.  One cake is a private cloud (or on premise), and the other cake is a public cloud.

Every IT organization will have some form of this two, three layer cake collection depending on size, costs benefits, performance, and security issues.

Vendors have a slightly different view.

For example:

• Oracle is pushing their latest Exadata/Sun servers for private clouds, but they suggest both clouds in their roadmap migration strategy.
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM which offers both on premise and cloud, and the ability to switch back and forth if you choose to go either route.  Why not?  They own the same product.
• Salesforce is 100% in the public cloud.  No halfway point here.  It’s 100% adoption or nothing.

Migration Strategy

In most cases, the SaaS applications are the first to get migrated in the cloud.  Email and CRM are usually the first choices.  As user adoption and confidence increases (along with cost savings), you will see more and more organizations consider the next “layer” which is PaaS in the cloud.

SaaS is also the first to get migrated simply because it is the easiest of the three layers.  If done correctly, it will show benefits immediately.

You will also see power users bypassing IT directly and choosing a cloud SaaS service such as external email, storage, and video conferencing because of the IT policies imposed within the organization.  For example, If your corporate email limit is 10Mb, and Gmail is 20Mb, some users will simply use Gmail to send a 12Mb file! 

What Percentage of Customers Choose the Cloud?

In this video from Software Advice, we have Software Advice CEO Don Fornes interviewing Brad Wilson, the General Manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  He doesn’t give an exact number of percentage of customers choosing the Cloud, but rather explains the benefits of choosing one over the other along with some helpful tips for consideration.

It’s about 5 minutes long.  Sorry, no cake.