Open cloud standards or vendor lock-in
Vint Cerf (Father of the Internet) is calling for standards in the cloud in an interview with InfoWorld (see the whole interview here). I enjoy following Vint’s logic whenever he imparts it, as it’s usually spot on.
Remember how hard it used to be to change wireless carriers? Enter number portability and interoperability between carriers for exchanging provision/termination information and the result is a few minutes on the phone with the change almost immediately. Not that changing wireless carriers is something we want to do all the time, but the standards that made switching possible also bring other useful features to light, such as better customer service, accountable behavior from the carrier and open competition for features, all competing for your business because they don’t have the complacency derived from the proprietary lock-in of the past.
Proprietary lock-in is the elephant in the room with cloud computing. It’s ugly and it’s big, and not enough people are talking about it yet. Vint focused on the standards to enable interoperability, in his interview but fell short of calling on the proprietary nature of clouds to open up. He said “people are going to want to move data around, they’re going to want to ask clouds to do things for them… they might even want to have multiple clouds interact with each other in order to take advantage of the computing power offered through such combinations”.
The bigger issue here though is the proprietary nature in which the current cloud offerings are built. Microsoft today pulled its Office products from its online store to comply with a court order requiring it to remove customer XML technology from Word. When people weave in proprietary tentacles designed to create lock-in, it eventually comes around to bite.
Another gotcha to look out for is standards driven very hard by the special interests some companies competing with existing products behind the standard (i.e. when the standard discussions come after the product has been introduced). In these cases standards don’t automatically bring the best-of-breed behaviors, in fact often it’s quite the opposite, (remember the Betamax and VHS standards wars?). If Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and Google drive their own existing formats as opposed to focusing on open collaboration we could be headed for another Betamax/VHS showdown.
I would encourage us to speak up, we want open standards, we want transparency and flexibility to encourage vendors to compete based upon the merits of how best they service the needs of their customers, and not how they can lock-in a market from leaving. A new report from ComputerWorld shows a tremendous shift from legacy application servers to Tomcat and that’s the sort of thing we’ll see with cloud.
I’m happy to report that SunGard Higher Education’s Open Digital Campus follows these ideals and is a good example of vendor openness and customer-need focus. It’s open, and it is measured on customer satisfaction and nothing else. I look forward to an open 2010. We need similar efforts in the overall cloud arena.
March 16th, 2010 at 11:10 am
There’s a special need for openness and standardization in the digitization of higher education data. Students and families are woefully unprepared to make high level decisions about their educations; graduation requirements, for example, are practically indecipherable, let alone comparable between institutions. And increasingly, students’ grades and assignment data are being stored in the cloud.
The only company trying to standardize school and grade data is MyEdu, where I just started working. I’ve been tutoring high schoolers and college students for many years and am familiar with many college planning tools, but what really distinguishes MyEdu’s services is that they help you understand your requirements, plan out your college career wisely, and access and share your detailed graduation roadmap with the important players in your academic life - parents, friends, advisors, and professors.
But it all starts with accessibility to information from the schools on degree requirements, course catalogues, professor and grade data, etc. That’s why we support the Open Digital Campus initiative.