Vendor lock-in gets a bad wrap, especially when it comes to the cloud. Users may complain about it, and IT administrators may eye cloud platforms with distrust on account of it, but lock-in is one of the core tradeoffs that clients make in return for access to scalable, flexible cloud services. And that lock-in provides some security for service providers who are taking on the considerable infrastructure cost that building a cloud platform entails. That’s why IBM is now cultivating lock-in by adopting a version of the same strategy Microsoft used in the '80s and '90s to establish the Windows and Office monopolies—give away the product (in Microsoft’s case, by turning a blind eye to rampant piracy), so that your user base is locked in by the time you get really serious about charging.That looks to be the motive behind IBM’s Global Entrepreneur initiative, which promises early-stage startups free use of specific IBM cloud services, as well as access to the kind of sales, marketing, and technical expertise that Big Blue’s growing and hugely successful services arm typically charges big bucks for. Check out the roster of goodies for startups that are accepted to the program:
Under the new initiative, start-ups can for the first time:
- access IBM's software portfolio through a cloud computing environment, including IBM industry frameworks to accelerate software development;
- work side-by-side with scientists and technology experts from IBM Research to develop new technologies;
- take advantage of dedicated IBM project managers to assist in product development;
- attend new IBM SmartCamp mentoring and networking workshops with VC firms, government leaders, academics, and industry experts at the global network of 40 IBMInnovation Centers to build business and go-to-market plans;
- tap a new social networking community on IBM developerWorks to connect with other entrepreneurs and more than eight million IT professionals from around the world.
To qualify for the program, startups will need to be less than three years old, privately held, and "actively developing software aligned to IBM's Smarter Planet focus areas." IBM is partnering with 19 associations and VC groups in different parts of the world in order to identify startups and attract them to the initiative.
All told, anything that gets promising, early-stage companies to build their software directly to IBM's cloud is great for IBM—and the fact that these companies will also get a free taste of IBM's consulting services is an added bonus. But is it good for the startups?
The answer to that latter question depends entirely on how good IBM's cloud offerings are, and not so much on the fact of the lock-in itself. That's because lock-in is a defining feature of the cloud landscape, and when you decide to use cloud services either as a consumer or a company, you have to go in with your eyes open.
Lock-in goes with the territory
The issue of lock-in comes up enough in discussions of the cloud that it's worth recapping how it works for readers who don't follow the topic as closely.
In a nutshell, cloud services are offered at three levels of abstraction, and the higher up you go on the abstraction ladder, the more you're locked in to a specific vendor's offering.
The lowest level with the least lock-in is infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). A great example is Amazon's EC2, which lets you cheaply and quickly get metered access to any number of virtual Windows or Linux machines. If at some point you decide you don't like EC2, you could always host identically configured VMs on your own in-house hardware, and ditch Amazon's platform entirely.
At the next level up are platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings like Google App Engine. It's at this level that the real lock-in starts. If you build our application on App Engine, then it's an App Engine application. And if Google's platform goes down, as it has done once already this year, then so does your app. Or, if you decide you hate Google and want to switch, you'll have to rewrite the app.
At the topmost level of abstraction is software-as-a-service (SaaS), the most commonly cited examples of which are Salesforce.com and SugarCRM. These are cloud applications that you pay to access, and they've got your data siloed away in their cloud. For some SaaS apps, like Google Docs, you could conceivably get your data back out, but it's a pain. SaaS platforms are designed to ingest data and keep it, not to spit it back out in an easily portable format (though there's a movement afoot to change that).
Ultimately, lock-in will be a prominent feature of the cloud landscape from here on out, and more companies will follow IBM's strategy of actively targeting early-stage software startups in order to hook them on a specific platform. This isn't necessarily a bad thing or a good thing—it's just one more technological trade-off to juggle. So it's up to cloud users to educate themselves about the amount of lock-in that they'll be subject to when they commit to any cloud platform, and to factor that into their decision. If lock-in is a serious concern for you, then you'll have to be extremely careful about the kinds of cloud services you pick, and about how you use those services.
Source: Arstechnica.com
