Last week I had the chance to meet with Kate using our new Telepresence Room. It was a great experience to have a live discussion from Boston to Paris on the cloud. One of the topics in our discussion was the results of Kate’s poll on Cloud Watching few weeks ago. I understand that our results may be a bit unusual rather than presenting real industry research. I always remember the joke about internet surveys that says that “100% of people answered ”yes” on our website to the question “do you use the internet?” 🙂…
Getting back to the survey, Kate asked fundamental questions regarding Clouds. The first one is a positive proposition “I’d rather work on a cloud”. First of all, I was impressed to see that 51% of those surveyed answered “yes”. This is a good sign and introduces a potential trend in the adoption level of SaaS and online solutions. Even if I think that this level if extremely high compared to the SaaS adoption reports by analysts, I see this is a potential good sign. Secondly, it is interesting that 15% of people selected answered “I don’t care”. Actually, these answers represent the future trend in adoption of online and cloud technologies. Should you really care where your software located or where you store you data? Hmm… Good question. Here, we come to the second question on the survey– what is your concern with regards to Cloud Solutions?
So, the second question, “what is your concern with regards to cloud solution?”, brought more complicated responses. I found it interesting that people actually preferred to answer the second one rather than the first, which means people really are more concerned. Two major responses regarding Cloud concerns were about security (35%) and stability (32%). Security is always a major concern for companies trying to move their solution “outside of the firewall”, so I wasn’t surprised at all. Stability probably shows that people are not completely satisfied with online services in general, and assume that software services on a Cloud can go up and down frequently. I don’t know if this concern was raised by the last 1-2 Google’s outage, but I really don’t think you’d like to get a message like “too many tweets J” if the system sends this message to you repeatedly while you are waiting for your latest released model or drawing.
If you are interested to read more cloud related topics you can visit my personal blog and take a look on the following posts: The Biggest PLM Challenge on the Cloud, Where is the PLM shortcut to the cloud?, Where is PLM on Industry Cloud Map?
To conclude, I just wanted to remind you that our research was completely unscientific. We relied on our blog audience which is undoubtedly cloud-oriented. We will get back to you with the results of our poll and report about the latest changes and trends.
Oleg
