Salt Lake City, UT -- (ReleaseWire) -- 03/20/2017 --Research conducted by CollabTalk LLC and a team of graduate students within the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University is providing strong data that shows hybrid SharePoint solutions as a strategic alternative to moving legacy on-premises SharePoint environments directly to the cloud. The initiative is sponsored by Microsoft, PixelMill, B&R Business Solutions, and several other leading Microsoft partners, with results available in mid-April 2017.

Microsoft's SharePoint platform supports an estimated $10 billion partner ecosystem. However, as collaboration moves from on-premises to the cloud, many organizations struggle with moving years of infrastructure, customizations, and data to the cloud. Responses have been received from 45 countries, with 61% of respondents from outside the United States. Initial data shows 31% of respondents using hybrid SharePoint environments, but of those still managing on-premises environments, almost half intend to leverage hybrid within the next 1-3 years.

"Many of our customers still have workloads that have traditionally been better suited for on-premises SharePoint environments," says Mike Oryszak, Managing Director at B&R Business Solutions. "Specifically, we see custom applications, large scale ECM and Records Management solutions including our own Records Center product. While these solutions do not always fit into a pure cloud environment, they are well supported in a hybrid environment that can fully integrate the overall experience."

Hybrid presents an option to maintain existing on-premises infrastructure and data while taking advantage of the latest cloud features and solutions, but there is little data to quantify the extent of the hybrid SharePoint ecosystem. The goal of the research project is to provide accurate data around each of these points, helping customers, independent software vendors (ISVs), and strategic integrators (SIs) to better plan their hybrid strategies for SharePoint.

According to Eric Overfield, SharePoint MVP and President of PixelMill, "Technology is always evolving, and research plays a large part in that evolvement. A survey focused on hybrid SharePoint is of particular importance. Collecting and analyzing the feedback can only help us improve hybrid SharePoint and not only adapt it to the needs of the individual, but also address the questions and concerns that come along with new technology. Research is the foundational stepping stone in understanding the possibilities, improving the functionalities and expanding the capabilities of SharePoint."

The customer survey remains open at http://hybrid-sp.collabtalk.com/ and will be available through close-of-business on March 22nd (PDT).

Sponsors of this research include Microsoft (Redmond, WA), PixelMill (Davis, CA), B&R Business Solutions (Colts Neck, NJ), Crow Canyon Systems (Benecia, CA), tyGraph (Waterloo, Ontario Canada), Rencore (Munich, Germany), and Focal Point Solutions (Cincinnati, OH), with media sponsors Redmond Magazine, BZ Media, fiftyfiveandfive, the European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Conference, Collab365 community, and ShareThePoint.