40% of Companies Polled in Early Stages of Understanding Cloud
Posted by Margaret Dawson on October 4, 2010
I had the pleasure of presenting with former IDC analyst Aaron Goldberg in a Ziff Davis Webinar last week, titled: Business to Business Integration – How the Cloud Makes Partnerships Work!
During the Webinar, we polled the audience (over 150 attendees) about their cloud strategies or implementation plans. Nearly 40% of those polled said they were still in the early stages of understanding the cloud.
This, in spite of the fact that we are pummeled with articles and information about the cloud every day. But this rings true with what I hear from prospects and customers every day. The most common questions I am asked are: “how do you define the cloud?” and “How do I get started?”.
While defining what the cloud is may be important, it’s actually more important IMO to define what it is NOT. The cloud is not a solution in and of itself. It is a new and compelling delivery method or consumption model for technology. But any solution, whether cloud, hosted or on-premise, must solve a business or technical challenge.
In our case, the challenge we are solving is integration. We deliver our solution via the cloud with managed services, because that enables the scalability, performance, interoperability and agility that is needed for seamless B2B integration.
I also tell folks that the cloud is not an all or nothing game. Most companies will take a hybrid approach, using the cloud to augment, extend or integrate applications and systems that are both on-premise or cloud based. So, for that 28% that are trying to figure out which solutions make sense to leverage the cloud, they might consider a hybrid approach.
To watch this Webinar on-demand, go here: http://www.eseminarslive.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/IBM092910/
Tags: B2B Integration, Cloud Computing, cloud platform, Ziff Davis
[...] it’s also clear that a great deal of confusion remains. Just as we heard during a recent Webinar poll, a huge number of folks in this survey stated that a lack of understanding cloud benefits was the [...]
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