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Enterprise Ain't Going Into the Cloud?

According to Chris Petersen, APAC director of channels at Open Text, it is unlikely that enterprise data will ever go to the cloud due to regulatory issues and bandwidth costs.

In a recent interview with ZDNet Asia, Petersen gave his outlook on the enterprise future in the cloud.

Despite the fact that many and many more companies warm up towards cloud computing, Petersen insists the organizations will continue to store a large part of data in-house and demand on-premise software. He attributes his reasoning to regulatory compliance and the higher bandwidth costs associated with moving data offsite as substantial barriers to mainstream enterprise adoption of cloud computing technology.

The funny thing is that Petersen’s employer tends to think otherwise, judging by Open Text’s recent move into the Windows Azure cloud by offering a "first-of-its-kind” records management and archiving capability for Microsoft’s new cloud-based operating system Windows Azure. Open Text will incorporate these cloud-based capabilities into its Enterprise Library Services offering early next year.

Records management is a pretty extensive part of any enterprise, often taking up massive amounts of server space. Petersen is making his point only to prove that cloud computing is not a threat to the Enterprise CMS industry players like Open Text because the need to keep thorough records of in-house data will persist, he said.

But we all know his attempt is a futile one. Gartner predicts cloud computing to be one of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2009 for enterprise-level businesses. SaaS is thriving, CMS market included, as predicted earlier this year.

If anything, today’s customers with tight IT budgets, especially in the SMB sector, will look beyond such expensive solutions as Open Text and explore cloud- or SaaS-based alternatives.

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