Went out for a rather nice Thai meal last night with two fellow SharePointers, Paul Gallagher and Mark Wilson. It was great to catch up as I hadn’t seem them for ages. It was also worth it to see the sweat pouring down Mark’s face as he ate the world’s hottest Thai salad! We chatted about many things, but naturally SharePoint was mentioned on more than one occasion. (I know, geeks, on a Friday night as well!)
We have all been working with SharePoint for many years and have enjoyed both the opportunity and reward it brings. SharePoint has been the horse to back for a very long time (in technology terms anyway). Happy days!
However, how long is it going to last for? I remember a time when Lotus Notes was the dominant collaboration and email tool, but that’s now dropped off the radar, all good things come to an end I guess…
The things that SharePoint can now do are incredible. It’s a document management tool, CMS, Social network tool, application platform, BI tool, Intranet, collaboration tool… the list goes on! Once it gets properly “mobile” so that users can work with it from home (BYOD), it should become even more dominant and probably put Microsoft well and truly on the map in the mobile market. (Who wants 2 phones?)
So seemingly, on the face of it, SharePoint is set to last for a very long time. No point in re-training just yet. No need to look at other technologies…
However, something that Notes didn’t have to worry about is coming. The “Cloud”! It seems to be the intent of all the big software companies to move the “IT” that we are currently doing on premise into their data centres. And if you follow general opinion, nothing is going to stop this juggernaut from hitting. It happened to electricity, water and gas so it must make sense for it to happen to all of our one’s and zeros as well! It’s pure economics. Isn’t it?
Ok, the Cloud for Microsoft still means “SharePoint” but a SharePoint they completely host, govern and run for us by someone who doesn’t work in our organisation. But! What does this mean for the people who work in organisations now who are installing, maintaining, developing, designing and analysing our beloved on-premise SharePoint?
Will the Cloud bring more opportunity for you, or less? After all – one canned solution won’t fit all of a customers needs, so there’s going to be a need to develop and customise, isn’t there?
How long do you think SharePoint “on-premise” is going to last for? If you are a SharePoint Admin, is it time to look for the next SharePoint, or are you good for another 10 or 20 years ? If you are a developer, will simply learning how to do the new App Model be enough? Will the App Store mean that there are less things to build as one vendor takes the market with their solution?
Discuss….
Tend to agree Rob. It’s going to be small tip toe steps. Orgs will move non-sensitive/personal data in there and leave the important stuff in-house. I do think its a time when MS (and all the other Cloud providers) need to be completely on top of their game. One “Sony Playstation” style hack, or a big outage will be a disaster.
I think that we will see more of a hybrid model of ‘on-premise + cloud’ evolve over time, cloud to run the features, on-premise to store the data. There are too many organizations today that have deep investments in large on-premise farms along with data residing in CIFS/SMB shares where they can’t just ‘move to the cloud’. The organizations that I work with are slowly migrating content into SharePoint from large file share content repositories and leveraging Remote BLOB Storage (RBS). Along with migrating content into on-premise SharePoint the other power of having on-premise is data recoverability that an organization controls; Eg. I want a document specific version from a point in time. The cloud does not offer the ability for organizations to control that level of granular recoverability easily. As Trevor said “the cloud isn’t the answer any time soon.”
With nearly 70% of their market base on-prem, the ‘cloud’ isn’t the answer anytime soon. Microsoft recognizes some orgs simply are unable to go to the cloud (regulatory, secrecy, and a variety of other reasons). Until the on-prem business offers no business value to Microsoft, there will be on-prem.
Ah Mark you have hit the nail on the head once again! This has been my concern for on-premise since the yammer integration (for what it was) announcement. If as it sounds yammer will be the social underpin of the whole office family, how to we install yammer on premise like we do for Lync, office, crm, nav, SharePoint?????
Well we don’t! Obviously
Admins and developer still have a place on the cloud as the skills are transferrable, to me its still a specialised skill set.
Whilst i think Cloud is going to be the best option for small businesses i don’t think the cloud is the best fit for all companies. Sure MS offer private cloud with dedicated server, some companies are happy to roll their own private cloud. The nature of the work the company im currently with doesn’t lead itself to Tennant hosting and we already have infrastructure in place.
It may well be on MS road map for the future to become a cloud only service for all of its existing products.
As with everything though nothing last forever and if MS decide to kill on-premise something else will take its place, that’s IT
