It might be time to tap the brakes on the common belief that there’s a wholesale mad dash to the cloud. Organizations are beginning to sound more interested in a combined on-premises and off-premises enterprise solution, according to Rick Gouin (pictured, right), chief technology officer at the Winslow Technology Group LLC.

“I hear from a lot of my customers a push to get everything into the cloud. And at the same time, I’m starting to see the other end of that curve with things coming back in,” Gouin said. “A lot of our customers are finding a sweet spot in hybrid cloud solutions.”

Gouin visited with Stu Miniman (pictured, left) (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent WTG Dell EMC Users’ Group event in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed key reasons for adopting the hybrid cloud, storage trends and the emergence of alternative hypervisors, which run virtual machines. (* Disclosure below.)

WTG customers are showing more enthusiasm for placing workloads into the cloud structure and then bringing them back on-prem after a period of time, according to Gouin. “The key thing for cloud infrastructures is that elasticity,” he said.

Move toward a hyperconverged environment

WTG has been working closely with customers on storage options, specifically whether to refresh a traditional storage environment or move to a hyperconverged model. “We’re finding that more customers are willing to take that chance on a hyperconverged environment,” Gouin stated.

A careful analysis is essential to making an informed decision, and Gouin indicated that there will be a mix of storage models for now. “We don’t think that hyperconverged is going to completely replace mid-range storage. Different customers are going to want different things,” he said.

Gouin is particularly interested in the options offered by alternate hypervisors. While VMware Inc. continues to own a significant share of the hypervisor market, alternatives such as the Citrix XenServer and Microsoft’s Hyper-V are beginning to appear in enterprise data centers.

“We’ve seen a marketplace that’s been dominated by an 800-pound gorilla for a long time. I love seeing a couple of different options that can bring some actual different business value,” Gouin concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of WTG Dell EMC Users’ Group. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for WTG Dell EMC Users Group. Neither Winslow Technology Group, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE