Learning from an audience of cloudsourcing candidates

Last week, I summarized our webinar with Mark Newhall, an expert at corporate transformation powered by cloud technology, on the topic of "the path to cloudsourcing." Joining us for that discussion was an audience of 80 IT decision makers and influencers interested in cloudsourcing.  Our interaction with these cloudsourcing candidates was just as informative as our discussion with Mark.

In this post, I wanted to summarize what we learned about the leading edge of cloud adoption, and respond to some of the questions we received.

1) Cloudsourcing is getting established as a consumption model

About half of cloudsourcing candidates already have more than 25% of their IT landscape in the cloud.  For this part of the market, adoption is shifting from a few edge applications to become a much more significant part of their IT landscape.  Even more interesting, a full quarter of cloudsourcing candidates said that they had more than 50% of their IT landscape in the cloud with 6% saying that they were completely in the cloud.  (Very exciting to see more and more members in the serverless enterprise club...would love to hear from more companies like this!)

How do cloudsourcing candidates see this changing over the next 5 years? Not surprisingly, they expect to accelerate their transition away from on-premise infrastructure and applications.  Looking forward 5 years, 57% said that they would have over half of their IT landscape in the cloud.  And 27% expected to be completely serverless-- roughly in line with Gartner's prediction that 20% of all enterprises would own no IT assets by 2010.

2) Salesforce and Google are broadly deployed. Solutions that combine their strengths could change the way we use enterprise applications.

Not surprisingly, Salesforce and Google Apps are broadly deployed at cloudsourcing candidates. With a significant number of companies using both, there is an opportunity to rethink how we use enterprise apps. Enterprise applications today are largely siloed, requiring the user to make a significant investment to extract meaningful insights. This creates a huge gap between how day-to-day work actually gets done and business context, which is trapped inside various applications. 

With so many companies using multiple cloud applications, there's an opportunity to bridge this gap.  Here's a demonstration of what's possible already between Salesforce and Google....stay tuned for more on this topic.

3) In many cases, the business is still driving adoption and looking for ways to involve IT

Getting "IT on board" was one of the major concerns of cloudsourcing candidates.  Mark's experience at Corporate Express is instructive:

Mark found that, in the beginning, IT looked at cloud as a diversion. But, as it got more attention internally, IT became interested but raised concerns around security and availability. As IT started to use and deploy the systems, they saw first-hand how much better things went than with traditional software.  Things like regression testing, UAT, etc. were much easier with Salesforce. The really turning point was when Mark's team started integrating Salesforce with other systems and IT was able to work directly with the platform.

So the lesson is basically to engage IT and encourage them to build something using the cloud platform you're considering.  Once IT teams have experienced what's possible with cloud platforms, there's no turning back.

4) Fears about security and availability are still holding back adoption, especially in IT

Even with an audience that is rapidly moving along the path to cloudsourcing, we still saw significant concerns about security and availability.  A lot of the dialog on this blog has been on the topic of security.  Here's a summary of our discussion with Mark on the topic: 

• Look -- the more you learn about what cloud providers are doing with your data, the more comfortable you'll feel. Learn about what they're doing: IP whitelisting, 2 factor authentication, etc.
• Compare -- make the right comparison to what you actually have today rather than the ideal state.  The least safe place for your data is a thumbdrive or a laptop or a mobile device, not Google or Salesforce's servers.
• Select -- the right application to move to the cloud. It's best to start with "edge" applications that everyone in your enterprise is completely comfortable with migrating.

When it comes to availability, much of the same advice applies.  You can also use multiple platforms to build solutions to address even stringent availability requirements.  For example, Salesforce has a few minutes of downtime for maintenance every month. If you need access during that time, the Force.com platform allows you to build offline solutions or switch to a mirrored environment in another data center.  Again, it's a question of looking to see how available the cloud app you're considering is, comparing it to what you actually have today, and of course selecting the right app to start with.

Ultimately, we're excited that so many of you are actually on the path to cloudsourcing. Please share your questions and success stories with us and we'll do the same!

Ryan Nichols is the Vice President of Cloudsourcing and Cloud Strategy for Appirio.