As we all know, getting new and existing Microsoft SharePoint customers to the “cloud” aka Office 365 & Azure has been the major push for Microsoft as of the last year or so. This can be seen from internal Microsoft employee restructuring along with their sales incentives, SharePoint Online product redevelopment to have feature parity with the on-premises version, the new app model, and generally Microsoft marketing in general. Although this trend will not stop anytime soon, it is comforting to see Bill Baer (senior product manager on the Microsoft SharePoint marketing team) officially indicate on the Microsoft SharePoint blog that Microsoft is still dedicated to their customers who have or who have aspirations for on-premises deployments of SharePoint.
For those who are evaluating whether to use SharePoint internally on-premises versus a competitor and were scared that Microsoft will stop supporting it soon in exchange for Office 365, this type of messaging should help your decision in continuing to use SharePoint as an on-premises platform.
In the article Bill Baer states:
“We remain committed to delivering support and solutions for our customers whether in the cloud or on-premises, through cumulative updates, future service packs and content to ensure that wherever you have SharePoint deployed, behind the firewall or in the cloud, customers will continue to have the support they need to ensure the continued success and benefit of constant innovation.”
View the full blog here –> http://blogs.office.com/b/sharepoint/archive/2013/10/04/transforming-business-with-microsoft-sharepoint.aspx