How do you see enterprises adopt the cloud today? Adopting web-scale apps (like salesforce) or legacy apps (like SAP, Oracle)?

This is a really good question, and I'm sure you would receive a number of well-thought out and relevant, timely responses to it, but posing it as "Anonymous" frankly doesn't inspire a lot of interested and potential posters to respond. I could be wrong, but that's my "HO" anyway!

I agree that this is a great question, really great...I could go on for pages but I’ll try to be as brief as possible.

Legacy solutions (large, on-premise solutions) will always be entrenched in larger processing environments. The challenge legacy users face is integrating the new data sources that make up "the big data flood". Users must glean useful information from new data that originates in cloud-based apps, data from web traffic, and social media data, and correlate all this with existing offline data stored in data warehouses. Accordingly, CFO’s would tell you that their top 3 initiatives involve business intelligence, analytics, and performance management.

The data born in the cloud is huge – hence, there is the intrinsic problem of analytics – this is a game changing, real paradigm shift we get to live through. Data warehouses are capacity constrained, batch intensive, CPU intensive, and demanding of IT. The cloud and cloud-based tools like Salesforce are nimble, scalable, cost effective, and secure. We will have no choice but to overcome any visceral discomfort that comes from using data in the cloud; on-premise traditional solutions cannot easily solve the big data problem.

I believe the challenge is finding insights in your data and as we shift toward cloud-based solutions that can pull in the disparate data sources, including the relevant parts from legacy solutions, the insights will become more apparent. The game has changed. Not all data has to be stored in one place for effective analysis; but it must be accessible. The time is on us to rely on intelligent, cloud tools that help us make sense of all these data sources.

I have a white paper that I will post on the Proformative site shortly about digital analytics in particular, you can read more there. It should be up later this week.
Good luck!

I'm seeing most companies starting with web-scale apps. However, most legacy app providers are also introducing cloud-based applications. For example, we use Microsoft's Office 365 to handle email, office and sharepoint apps - all hosted in the cloud and with good results. This eliminates the need to implement all sorts of IT infrastructure to get the business up and running.

Enterprise ERP solutions, e.g. SAP and Oracle now have cloud solutions available from leading services providers such as AT&T and SunGard. These solutions have higher SLA's than most end users could provide via their internal IT and offer an opex cost model vs. capex.