Who can help with your transition?
When vetting vendors, make sure to heed the lessons of the dot-com boom and bust. During the 1990s, IT vendors sprouted up out of nowhere. Often these so-called vendors were inexperienced at best and charlatans at worst. I’m afraid the cloud might herald another era of fly-by-night opportunists hoping to cash in fast on a hot opportunity. Don’t be their victim! Always take time to identify a group with a proven track record. At the end of the day, you want a trusted partner with expertise. (I would be remiss, of course, if I didn’t take this opportunity to mention that Intertech was hired by Microsoft to write Microsoft’s Azure courseware!)
MIT’s McAfee also has this advice:
“Talk with your core enterprise software vendors to understand their plans for the cloud. Many, if not most, of their offerings are currently available only on-premise. When are they going to release cloud versions of their applications? How are they going to help current customers migrate to them? As you take steps into the cloud, you’ll very likely be working with your company’s IT department and CIO. Their attitude toward to cloud computing will be critical and highly revealing. In my view, a CIO’s lack of enthusiasm about the cloud these days is about as red a flag as a factory manager’s disinterest in electrification would have been a century ago.”
McAfee also suggests that companies start running experiments with software-as-a-service and that they do their next development project in the cloud. He notes that the cloud “contains powerful software resources that developers can plug into. Google Maps and Chart Tools, for example, can be easily integrated with a company’s data to produce a wide range of visualizations.”
The bottom line, as stated by Andrew McAfee: “Over time, more and more of the business world’s software is going to live in the cloud. You probably want to be part of this trend sooner rather than later.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself!