Mr. Trollope:

I’m a big fan! Great post. I agree that cloud solutions will continue to grow in both size and types of offerings, of which collaboration is a good fit. The “cloud” moves us much closer to computing as a service, where computing resources “disappear”. We won’t even think about where computing comes from. This is much like electrical service today. I have outlets (AC power outlets or Ethernet jacks, doesn’t make a difference). Wireless power is coming (not quite as versatile as WiFi and mobile). I happen to work for a power company. It’s good to work for a company that sells something everyone needs. As good as we are we have customers that insist on the ability to generate power locally. Some use it as backup for our services where electricity is critical to their mission (think hospitals). Others generate their entire supply, considering their mission too critical to leave to public suppliers (think military).

Cloud computing will be much like electrical service; great for the masses. But there will always be a set of organizations that will be very reluctant to move services to the cloud. The reasons will be as varied as the organizations; regulatory obligations, security concerns, CapEx vs. OpEx, predictability, and perceived reliability.

My company is unlikely to move production services to the cloud for all of these reasons. With technologies such as Cisco ACI and UCS our IT department continues to become more efficient. This increase in efficiency along with the fact that we’re “capital rich and O&M poor”, and with management’s security concerns, we’ll likely move only a very small percentage of our work load to the cloud. Collaboration won’t be moved. Premise based solutions such as CWMS, Unified Communications Manager, TelePresence Conductor, and Jabber support my company. We’d love to use Spark. But our Risk Management team and company management don’t support cloud based collaboration.

I realize that over time, the number of companies that don’t move to the cloud will likely shrink. But based on feedback and ideas I see in the Cisco Collaboration Communities, there are still a large number of organizations that support only a premise based set of solutions. I would love to see Cisco offer premised based solutions in parallel with cloud offerings.

Thank you.