Cloud Migration Insights For Software Companies
By Abby Sorensen, Editor
Forbes recently released the second iteration of the Cloud 100 (you can see the full list here). The list is littered with software companies, which shouldn’t come as a surprise unless you’ve been living under a rock. Forecasts and adoption rates for cloud technologies are all over the map, but the trends are clear – cloud computing spending is projected to double and reach upwards of $160 billion by 2020 (see the “Roundup Of Cloud Computing Forecasts, 2017” by Forbes for more data). Consider:
- Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) reported 47 percent revenue growth for Q4 2016 compared to Q4 in 2015.
- Among CFOs at tech companies, 74 percent say “cloud computing will have the most measurable impact on their business in 2017,” according to the 2017 BDO Technology Outlook Survey.
- The trend is not isolated to the US. Public cloud computing spending in Canada is projected to increase by more than 130 percent from 2016 to 2020.
For young software companies like CentralBOS, this is very good news. I interviewed Joe Meyer, founder and CEO of the ERP software company, for a feature story in the August issue of Software Executive, and his optimism about cloud adoption is clear. Despite being founded in 2014 and entering a crowded marketplace of ERP software competitors, Meyer thinks CentralBOS has a competitive advantage because it built the company in the cloud. Competitors with on-premise legacy solutions are faced with the daunting, expensive, time consuming task of a complete rewrite to migrate to the cloud. The unwavering confidence CentralBOS has that its target market is going to the cloud is supported by Gartner’s 2016 ERP Software Market Snapshot report.
Dan Catan, VP of sales and marketing at CentralBOS, shares Meyer’s outlook. He’s working to educate both clients and potential reseller partners on the market shift to the cloud. There’s a difference between a solution that’s on-premise and just remotely hosted, and a truly secure cloud offering. Meyer didn’t take a firm stance on when the switch would flip on cloud migration, and speculated it could be as long as another decade. For now, CentralBOS also realizes, “It’s not just about putting your software on AWS and telling all of your customers ‘ta-da’ I’m in the cloud. That is basically a hosted environment, where you have to turn up a whole stack for every single client. It may be a little more cost efficient for the client, but at the end of the day it’s not efficient for the software company.”
Meyer challenges his peers in the software world to, “Ask yourself as a software company, ‘am I positioned to where the market is going?’” If your software company still has work to do on a cloud offering, that should have been started yesterday. Find the funding, change the priorities of development projects, get caught up to speed on security considerations, or risk being beat out by young companies like CentralBOS that built a software solution from the ground up in the cloud.