Well current trends show that on-premise SharePoint market is going down. Microsoft has been being communicating for years that there is only Office 365 planned on the long run. As still there is a version for SharePoint 2016 on premise, but a lot of integrated functionalities like MySite, OneDrive or search are provided rather (or only) in different hybrid cloud scenarios. Hence developer certifications are cancelled as well; there is only Office 365 in the future. It basically means that the SharePoint on-premise market will go down, not because there is no demand for the technology, just because Microsoft communicates so strongly and consequent: Firstly the experts and the partner companies will change expertise, concentrating rather on other technologies than SharePoint. Secondly, the end customers will recognise as well, even if there is a demand for the technology, there is not enough expertise on the market, there is not enough support from Microsoft and last but not least, most of the cool new features are only available in the cloud. So the market is falling...
So, what is gonna happen ? Certainly it is possible that everyone changes to the cloud, although I think there are gonna be companies that still want to make sure to have the data privacy. Perhaps there is gonna be sometimes a so called "black" or highly secured cloud, where really nobody is capable to get the data apart from the owner, but until only the standard scenarios exist, the only option will be for companies who want to store high privacy data is to build and host a private cloud, that is gonna be pretty much expensive.
So is it possible not just quitting from the market, but really "sell short" in a stock exchange sense, meaning betting on the falling of the market and trying to make capital gain from the fall ? Well it is not typical to interpret "sell short" for a technology cycle, but I think it is not impossible. I can imagine two scenarios, focusing on the customers who still want to use internal collaboration and intranet solution with high data privacy and they are having SharePoint:
a. Creating regional private hosting solutions, to host Office 365 private: well as it is certainly a solution, it is actually not sure how much and which scenarios will be from Microsoft supported. As it is surely possible to host in a private cloud Office 365, I am not sure if all functionalities or integration possibilities are supported. As an example, what about Azure Data Mining services or Cortana analytics ? It is pretty much questionable if something similar will be supported in a private cloud scenario.
b. Start to rechange SharePoint with another technology, that surely will develop on-premise scenarios in the future as well. The process and the idea can be actually the same that Microsoft uses to attract SharePoint companies in the cloud.
Let we find such a T technology that:
- T can be good integrated with SharePoint
- T provided on-premise solutions on a long run.
- T provides collaboration, corporate intranet functionalities and possibly rapid application development capabilities a well.
- T provides useful extensions to SharePoint.
- you can scale up and out T.
- on a small scale T has got a moderated entry price.
- T should not be from a no-name provider, otherwise nobody buys it.
- start sell to T with SharePoint integration in a way that new SharePoint functionalities are fully or partly realized on T.
- As the SharePoint on-premise market falling start to re change or re implement existing functionalities on T with or rather without SharePoint integration. That is the reason why rapid application development is important, you will never have the chance to get alive your SharePoint 2010 source code on another platform, you have to re implement the business applications.
- At the end, migrate everything to T, forgetting SharePoint.
Does anybody know T ?
