Cloud Stack Strategy: Lock-in and Partnerships

I have been thinking (I would like to say 'a lot,' but who knows, really) about this idea of XaaS "anything as a service" and how the technology stack in that world stacks up. (Pun intended.)

It seems as though a hardware provider can couple itself to the other layers in the stack because hardware was developed to do whatever software wanted. Thus, we see have seen a successful integration of "Buy a Mac? Get Mac OS, Mac applications" etc. But even that is becoming blurred with increasing interoperability and cross-platform capabilities, even down to the hardware level (i.e. partitioning the Mac hard drive to run Windows.)

Now, in a cloud computing world, the path to linking an IaaS provider to its SaaS products is even more loose. How can a company like Amazon tie in their infrastructure to SaaS products? Can they create proprietary links between this new form of hardware and software, or should it continue to become an open source world? In an article from Forbes from 2011, Joe McKendrick voices his concerns to Thomas Erl (CEO of Architura Eduation Inc.,) asking:

"What if a good part of your application infrastructure resides with a single cloud provider? 
“When you put a lot of your resources, a lot of your data in the cloud, you want to know that, a year later, you want to be able to move that to another cloud provider,” Thomas says. “You want to know that you can move all that away to another cloud provider, or even bring that back on premises, if that’s the exit strategy.”"

An equally important question: Once they have figured out a pricing model that works with an open structure, how can companies compete and partner with each other all at the same time? A recent example of a failure in this realm is VMForce: a partnership between VMware and Salesforce.com to create a PaaS offering aimed at SaaS and web service developers. The problem is that both of them wanted to become dominant players in the PaaS market.

It sounds like a partnership model is problematic at this stage in the game, and staying in one layer of the stack will soon make you obsolete. So what should XaaS providers do? My theory (feel free to challenge): Whoever is the first to figure out how to own the entire stack, will be the victor, probably to the detriment of exit strategies for enterprises.



Forbes Source Article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2011/11/20/cloud-computings-vendor-lock-in-problem-why-the-industry-is-taking-a-step-backwards/