If most technology companies are honest, predicting the future of cloud is challenging. It’s a complex, evolving industry, and it’s hard to know if cloud solutions will take 80% or 30% of the market in the next five years.

Winslow Technology LLC, an information technology solutions and consulting service, has countless conversations with enterprise customers about public cloud, hybrid cloud, and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions in an effort to make sure that its customers are informed about the multitude of possibilities — and the reality of what’s truly going on in the cloud industry.

“These statistics, these assertions, these predictions [about cloud] — we’re getting bombarded with them without context,” said Rick Gouin (pictured), chief technology officer of Winslow Technology Group. “I think that it leaves a lot of our customers feeling like they’re behind the curve a little bit, because … you’ll hear 80% … of companies have a cloud strategy, and there’s never the follow up to see, ‘Did it change two weeks later, was it actually implemented?'”

Gouin spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the WTG Transform event in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed how to help customers position themselves in the cloud in an unpredictable future (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Growth around cloud, hybrid strategy are keys moving forward

So what can customers know as they prepare for a future with cloud? The reality is that in an unpredictable, emerging industry, there are no solid answers, according to Gouin. However, what is certain is that the industry will indeed continue to grow.

“We’re going to continue to figure out different ways to extract value from those services,” Gouin said. “We want to help our customers position themselves to take advantage of that. I’m not going to throw a fake number out there, but we know that [the industry is] going to be bigger than the one today.”

Winslow Technology is constantly checking in with its customers to make sure that they can make better decisions when it comes to cloud, hybrid solutions, and hyperconverged infrastructures. One of the biggest hurdles for customers is that they just don’t know how to implement or leverage public cloud into their current on-prem IT environment, and that stops a lot of companies from moving forward with an actual strategy, according to Gouin. If customers understood the ideas around hyperconverged solutions or partnering with cloud services, it can change their mindsets.

“What we’re not talking about is saying, ‘Hey, customers, you’ve got to re-platform everything. You’ve got to rewrite everything to leverage all these different cloud services and cloud platforms.’ That’s a big lift for a lot of our customers,” Gouin said. “But what might not be such a huge lift is leveraging some of those cloud services, cloud connectivity capabilities that are built into those platforms from those partners like Nutanix, like VMware, like Dell EMC.”

Companies who are interested in a cloud strategy should actually just plan to have a hybrid scenario — at least for the next few years as the industry continues to grow, according to Gouin.

“If you plan to end up in a hybrid end state, your whole environment is going to be much more cohesive. You’re going to have that app mobility; you’re going to have so much more flexibility than if you end up there by accident,” Gouin concluded.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE