Cloud-only is now the default posture. Plan the demonstration accordingly.

Of the systems Stackmark profiles, eleven are offered as multi-tenant cloud and nothing else. Private cloud and on-premise remain available, but mainly at the enterprise band, where regulated and heavily customised estates still require them. For a mid-market buyer the deployment decision has, in most cases, already been made by the market.

That is not a loss. It is a change in what the evaluation has to cover.

Questions that fall away

• Infrastructure sizing and database licensing.
• Backup ownership and restore testing, now the vendor's contractual obligation.
• The upgrade project as a capital event.

Questions that take their place

• Upgrade cadence, and how much notice a customer receives before a release changes behaviour.
• Tenant isolation: what is shared between customers, and how a noisy neighbour is contained.
• Configuration limits: what can be changed without code, because there is no longer a place to put code.
• Exit: how data comes out at the end of the term, in what format, and at what cost.

A buyer who arrives at a cloud-only demonstration with an on-premise question list will spend the hour on topics the vendor has already settled, and leave without the answers that decide whether the system can be lived with for seven years.

The enterprise exception

At the enterprise band, six profiled systems still offer private cloud or on-premise. These are not legacy options. They exist because some estates carry customisation, data-residency or audit requirements a multi-tenant service cannot meet. If yours is one of them, say so in the requirements document before the first vendor conversation; it removes most of the field.