I've been busy with my new project, but I've just picked up all the cloud talk going on at RedMonk.
I've left a brief comment, so I thought I'd post a copy here as well.
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Good post.
I've talked about this stuff for a long time but to cut a long story short, standards (as in open formats and APIs) are not enough to create portability and interoperability between providers nor do they solve the additional issues of competition and strategic control for vendors (and a host of others).
We are likely to only achieve competitive utility computing markets where we "write and run enterprise applications that you could move from cloud to cloud" if the markets are based upon open sourced standards.
Since IT is moving from a product to a service based economy with competition on Price vs QoS rather than product differentiation, the use open sourced standards is obvious for the service provision of ubiquitous activities.
It is however unappealing for those vendors who are wedded to a product world with competition based upon features. For those willing to accept the new world, there will be opportunities from brokerages to exchanges to compliance authorities and so on.
Posts you might find of interest.
- video of OSCON talk covering these issues
- Data Portability and all that Jazz
- JSops, JSops ... buy, buy, buy.
- Open Source Utility Grid
- Do we have to change?
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As for Alistair Croll's question on whether there is a way of solving the SaaS lock-in (or more correctly lack of second sourcing) issue - well yes there is, it's called open source. The real question that should be asked is when will the *aaS vendors realise that they are competing in a service and not a product based economy?
One final warning, as I've said before there will be more open sourced standards at the application layer of the stack than the framework (now called platform) and the hardware (now called infrastructure) layer. If your "product" doesn't become the open sourced standard when a market emerges around that service offering (whether it's CRM, HR, ERP or JavaScript Development Environments or VM etc), then the odds are it's game over for you. Standardisation and consolidation go hand in hand in the service world.
This is a disruptive change that is going on, and there will be casualties from the product world.
