For about a year, since we incorporated CloudHedge.io and during the 18 months of product building before that, we spoke with hundreds of prospects (both partners and clients included). Our team worked directly with clients and with partners, enabling them to try the product and later on-board them. While Partners are big global SI’s, customers range between SME to Fortune 100 companies.

Our observation has been that most of them are either re-hosting apps (at infra level) or trying to rewrite them with a long tail before releasing a cloud-native application.

Refactoring of applications across Enterprises vary between 5% to 30% of the total applications. This helped us revalidate market fitment of CloudHedge and also assess the growth that we should be gunning for over the next two years. Our dataset may be smaller compared to industry research, for e.g. over a third of IT leaders (34 percent) adopting containers plan to allocate at least $100,000 to those projects in 2018. Another report, from 451 Research, predicts that containers will have a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40%.

Below are observations while interacting with prospects:

• Cloud maturity or readiness varies across Enterprises. Most of them are heavily dependent on the success of a division (working in silos) which is tasked with driving “Digital Transformation” initiative.
• Top of the pyramid, the management, wants to quickly move applications to cloud, however, the middle or the lower part of the pyramid is either focused on keeping the lights ON or are scrambling to get some migration done (on their own or with the assistance of a consultant).
• For quick wins, apps are lifted and shifted (rehosted), however, 6 months down the line CFOs start asking for RoI.
• For management, there is always a challenge to manage the budget, time, and resources against the speed at which they would like apps to be migrated to cloud (public/private). 
• Most enterprises are trying out or adopting newer technologies e.g. containers, are confident of RoI for a specific app or group of apps. How can they scale that effort across the Enterprise, migrating more apps to cloud, is their biggest challenge! That’s where tools like CloudHedge are evaluated and used.
• Enterprises are automating application migration to cloud, however, they still have to figure out how to adopt or improve CI/CD method.
• Enterprises which are slightly ahead of the curve, e.g. have containerized applications and deployed them on Kubernetes cluster. However, most of them are struggling to fill up empty clusters.

What are your observations? Would love to hear your thoughts.