For the record, we went through this too. Kite is awesome, and I have no doubt it will succeed, but we fought the enterprise virtual appliance train for years. The cloud grew, we got more customers, but there were certain verticals we could never reach: finance, government, etc.

We recently built a virtual appliance. It's growing infinitely faster than our cloud solution ever did. Those numbers speak for themselves.

Certain products just need to have the virtual appliance option. I'm sure Kite will get there one day.

For now, I'm going to use it for personal projects because it's still a badass solution to a problem I have. :)