Bill Baer /bɛːr/

The French philosopher, Henry Bergson, once said “to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” While the Nobel Prize winner wasn’t talking about the software and services world, the thought is extremely applicable to technology- from development to administration to use. The adoption of, and change to, cloud computing is maturing at a rapid rate…but the move needs to be thoughtful.

At Microsoft we are truly embracing this change through our cloud first/mobile first mantra and we have seen customer interest grow for all of our maturing cloud services, in a very significant way- from IaaS capabilities in Microsoft Azure, to gaming and entertainment consumption in XBOX Live to our productivity and collaboration solutions for Office 365. In all cases, customers love the time to value, cadence of new and helpful features and predictive costs that the cloud computing offers.

However, we also know that the move to cloud doesn’t happen all at once. In Office 365, we have seen incredible interest and growth for all of our services, including SharePoint Online. To that end, we absolutely recognize customers need to balance their desire to adopt SharePoint Online, while still maintaining existing, on-premises, SharePoint Server investments until the time when they can be migrated to the cloud.

For those customers ready to thoughtfully embrace the change to cloud, we are committed to helping you with our hybrid models and tools so you can leverage the Microsoft Cloud to change your business endlessly. We believe the future of work is how we build relationships, share information, and respond to conditions that can change at a moment’s notice, Office 365 is the cornerstone of our response, and with our current and future investments we’re helping to bring you there with as little friction as possible.

For more information and to understand what hybrid scenarios can do for your business see the following resources:

Check out new downloadable content you can share with your organization at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn769084(v=office.15).aspx

Learn more about Hybrid Models with SharePoint and Office 365 [http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj838715(v=office.15).aspx]

Download Hybrid SharePoint 2013 Resources [http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj838715(v=office.15).aspx]

Check back often as we continue to innovate on our hybrid vision to help you realize the best of on-premises and the cloud.