As IT executives and staff work to enable better collaboration between employees and customers while supporting faster delivery of new business capabilities, they face the challenge of asking IT teams to adopt new technologies and vendors – while IT budgets are largely flat.

Meanwhile, skills and organizational structures need to change with the demand for new, hybrid cloud approaches for core business applications. There is tremendous pressure to create best-in-class systems, tailored to the organization, that enable business agility.

As part of its mission to provide high-quality education, networking and advocacy to its members, in March 2017 Quest International Users Group recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a study of 100 organizations that run core business applications in a hybrid cloud environment.

What Do ROI Leaders Do Differently?

What makes this study different and especially valuable to Quest members is that we focused on a select subset of survey respondents. Our joint team of Forrester Consulting and Quest specialists concentrated our analysis on organizations that are highly satisfied with the value they receive from their hybrid cloud applications investment.

We wanted to learn and share with our members the real-world secrets to achieving highly satisfactory returns on investments (ROI). The survey explored skills and strategies critical to success when running business applications in hybrid clouds, as well as challenges yet to be overcome.

We chose to survey companies running a range of on premises and software as a services (SaaS) core business application product lines from Oracle and other software providers. Consequently, Quest members can learn from customer – and possible competitor – best practices across a wide range of company sizes and industries such as high tech, manufacturing, and financial services, to name just a few.

One surprise from our survey efforts is that we hand an unusually high response rate from the C-Suite. Nearly two thirds of respondents who were highly satisfied with the value received from hybrid cloud investments were C-level executives.

So, what do the leaders do differently that makes them highly satisfied with their return on investment in hybrid cloud environments?

ROI Leaders Are Moving Quickly to Hybrid Clouds

By definition in our study, the companies we surveyed already run today in hybrid cloud environments. Also not surprisingly, for these ROI leaders more and more of their historic on-premises portfolio is moving to the cloud. By their own forecasts of planned or anticipated investments, this trend of moving away from on-premises in favor of public cloud and SaaS deployments will gain strength over the next few years.

What may surprise you is that leaders who are most satisfied with the value of their hybrid cloud investments have already moved or migrated the majority of their core business applications portfolio to the cloud.

Today, on-premises deployments comprise just under one-third of the core business application portfolio. The majority lives in the cloud in the form of software as a service (SaaS), traditional licenses running on public cloud platforms, and external private clouds.

Only about one-quarter of the applications spend today as seen by IT (not necessarily shadow purchases by line of business units) is on public clouds, though this is steadily increasing.

In three years, on-premises deployment’s share of the hybrid portfolio will shrink further from one third today to just over a quarter. Core business applications will be found on public cloud platforms and SaaS. The share of core business applications running on external private clouds will stay where it is today.

Learn More, Do More

In my next blog post about what ROI leaders in hybrid cloud do differently, I will share with you research data showing that cloud applications deployment strategies are evolving quickly.

Learn more in “Gain Agility While Mitigating Risk Through Hybrid Cloud,” a custom Technology Adoption Profile commissioned by Quest International Users Group with Forrester Consulting. Paid Quest members can access this new Forrester research within Quest’s new “Strategize and Act” Business Technology Content Center on Questdirect.org.

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