It seems like everything that we hear about these days in the IT arena is focused on the cloud. Of course, Acumatica can be run in the cloud and even was the first ERP application to be available for the Windows Azure cloud.
However, I think that we will see the cloud burst at some point, or at least have a hole punched in it. Why?
- People still own houses and cars. We don’t all rent and we don’t all lease our cars. If you have a long-term view, there is an economic advantage to owning a house or a car. I think that there is also an advantage to owning your own digital real estate. Now, of course, the cloud makes sense if you have a smaller scale need, but there are economies of scale associated with technology, just like with anything else.
- The cloud bubble has to burst or at least have a hole poked in it at some point. The dot com bubble and the recent housing bubble are good examples of bubbles that burst. I also think that our society is increasingly susceptible to bubbles because of the flash mob mentality related to trends. The news cycle has shortened, the “what’s cool in school” fads are more short lived, and the well-thought-out research paper gets passed over for the 60 second sound bite. All this creates more frenzy around bubbles.
Eventually, when the cloud hype begins to wane and people return to common sense, Acumatica will still be positioned to accommodate them. You can start in the cloud, but bring Acumatica on-premise when you become large enough. Then, if your company downsizes or your business unit breaks off on its own and you’re small again, you can take Acumatica back into the cloud. Bottom line, it’s nice to have both options.