Partly Cloudy

The media hype surrounding cloud computing in 2011 is pervasive. Last Sunday’s Super Bowl featured ads for Chatter.com, with cartoon versions of the Black-eyed Peas extolling the virtues of the Cloud; in late January, IBM announced plans to increase its adoption of cloud-based technologies into LotusLive’s services. The list goes on and on—cloud computing, as they say, has arrived.

Let’s bring our heads down from the clouds for a moment; I’d like to remind everyone of the value that resides in the legacy IT systems that have been supporting companies for many years. Corporations maintain hundreds of billions (yes, billions) in embedded legacy investments– they will not easily walk away from this invested capital. Moreover, cloud-based technologies still have a long way to go before they can successfully replace legacy products and services.

The solution– for now, at least– is to go hybrid. The benefit of deploying some cloud-based technologies is obvious, but why compromise the stability of on-premises solutions? Saugatuck Technology, a prominent web research and consulting firm, has been talking about this for years. They call it SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) 2.0.

Nice to know we’re in good company. At Prolifiq, we’ve deployed a hybrid model from the beginning. To read the details, check out my previous post: Hybrid and Proud.