I was pretty surprised!
Not that I think the cloud is the be-all, end-all of the application world, but more because I can see very strong benefits to it. I was surprised at the nearly complete dismissal of the cloud as a possible platform for them.
Their reasoning, though, is key.
First, their applications, provided by a third-party vendor and built in-house, won’t really easily support being transformed to support a cloud-based architecture… and they’re ok with this. They work as they are now – it’s the "if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it" thing. I get it. It makes sense. it would seem to me that at some point the systems will have to be updated just to support moving off of legacy systems software.
The second item though was admittedly a surprise. They indicated that, even if they simply moved everything to the cloud, created servers, dropped the applications onto them, etc., they wouldn’t be able to do that because the vendor would no longer support the application. Since they rely on the application, and the vendor required complete control over the hardware environment, this was basically a non-starter (to move to "unknown" provisioned commodity hardware).
I guess I never really considered that aspect of it. It seems like the hardware and systems were actually more likely to be more up to date than on-premise systems, but that’s just not good enough.
This is a fairly big issue I think. Software makers are going to need to work through providing support for solutions running in virtualized environments. It doesn’t really matter if it’s in the cloud or on-premise, it’s a more robust hosting environment and one that provides some enormous benefits.
Honestly, this reminds me of the older days of SQL Server. It used to be that you could actually be forbidden from applying simple service packs to SQL Server for fear of voiding your service agreements. There are still packages that say this, but my hope is that someday they’ll pull it together and realize how important the updates are and step up their game in supporting them.
Then perhaps we’ll have to set their sites next on virtualized and cloud-based hosting environments.
Hey, I can dream, right?