The Future of Cloud Computing

What’s driving the adoption of cloud computing models? To find out, Trillium chose to co-sponsor the fifth annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey conducted by North Bridge, a leading venture capital firm, and Wikibon, an open source community of industry analysts. The survey results were released in mid-December by way of a press release and a webinar conducted by both organizations. As the industry’s largest independent survey of cloud adoption trends, the results are an insightful snapshot of what is happening in the cloud market. And, given initiative like Trillium Cloud, as well as our integration with cloud solutions like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, the survey is of considerable interest to Trillium and our customers.

Some noteworthy results include:

• The respondents reported that the systems with which they engage with their prospects and customers are now dominated by cloud deployment approaches. Almost 82% of sales and marketing systems and 79% of customer service systems are using cloud approaches.
• 80% of the respondents are doing business analytics via cloud approaches.

It might be easy to conclude from the above that these are continuing signals of the LOB using cloud solutions as a way to execute end-arounds of enterprise IT, but the survey also references a “reemergence of IT’s use of cloud”, which the survey analysis concludes is an indicator of the “normalization of cloud.” Why that reemergence? Likely because agility is increasingly a motivator for cloud adoption and IT recognizes that the traditional on-premise deployments are a legacy that may not survive if business is to keep pace with modern demands. The embrace of cloud by IT may be a ‘get on board or get out of the way’ response to the need to be more quick and agile with solution development and deployment. How quick and agile? According to the survey, respondents want their systems to be delivering value within three months. That expectation is one of the reasons that solutions like Trillium Cloud are focused on “time to value” as an important metric for our customers. Though Trillium’s commitment is to begin delivering value in 30 days, not three months.

The survey also notes that organizations are using the cloud solutions to try to wring more value from their data through real-time analysis and operations. But there are challenges, as concerns about security, and privacy remain (for approximately one third of the respondents.) Being open to such concerns is one reason that Trillium has chosen not to be prescriptive about our cloud solution. Our customers can choose on-premise or cloud deployments in a solution-agnostic way. Same solution, same prospective results in terms of improvement of data quality – but we leave the deployment choice to our customers.

There are lots more to be found in the survey results, of course, but technology surveys are a bit like presidential polls in that they’re open to different interpretations. So readers are encouraged to check out the survey for themselves and see where their organization fits on the cloud adoption spectrum. You won’t find anything as brash as The Donald or as provocative as Bernie, but there’s lots of interesting information to be found.

by Chris Martins, Product Marketing Manager, Trillium Software