Our company provides on-premise ERP systems to small (we’re talking at most 20 person companies) wholesale distributors.
Pre-COVID, I was pushing for a cloud solution to our product and pivoting our company towards that model. We’re at a hybrid approach when COVID hit.
What ends up happening with an on-premise/hybrid cloud model is we end up doing a lot of the sysadmin/IT support work for our customers just to get our ERP working. This includes getting ahold of static IP addresses (and absolving responsibility), configuring servers/OSes, and several other things along the same vein that’s wholly irrelevant to the actual ERP like inventory management and accounting.
Long story short, these customers of ours end up expecting us to maintain their on-premise server without actually paying for help or being knowledgable about how it all works. We keep pitching them the cloud but they’re not willing to pay us a recurring fee even though it actually saves the headaches of answering the question “who’s responsibility is it to make sure this server keeps running?"
I think a lot of these answers here are dealing with large-scale products and services where the amount of data and capital costs is so massive it makes sense to start hiring your own admins solely to maintain servers. For these small mom-and-pop shops who are looking for automation, the cloud is still the way to go.