Establishment IT often behaves like the group of youths I advise on a regular basis as an element of my church responsibilities : “Damn the future, let’s live for the present. Stephen O’Grady offers a sharp critique of this short sighted tendency in enterprise IT, particularly as it relates to the cloud:. Much like Apple on the buyer level, ( commercial cloud providers ) Google et al demand sacrifices for simplicity. Perhaps–or make that likely–realizing that companies will usually sacrifice the future at the altar of the present.

We’ll give you the convenience and time to market now ; just don’t expect to leave later. And it’s tough to blame ( corporation IT ) for that, truthfully. They’ve got roles to do and youngsters to feed, and their blind trust in the technology industry to police itself and not lock them in this time as they’ve been locked in so often before is as Peanuts touching as it is gullible.

Whether Lucy will yank the soccer out from under them once again depends, as far as I should tell, on open-source. Why open source? Because opensource keeps sellers like Google and Amazon truthful by offering open possibilities to closed clouds ( e.g, Eucalyptus ). Also, it’s extremely possible that cloud computing will be elbowed open in significant tactics because of the furor raised over exclusive practices. This isn’t simply a matter of open-source recommends criticizing corporations for locking in consumers.

It’s also a clever sales method that an increasing array of corporations will use to win over consumers leery of signing over their data to an exclusive cloud supplier, outwardly once and for all. As the cloud gains importance, we’ll see an accelerating array of corporations that deliver software as a service ( SaaS ), but supply an “eject” mechanism thru open-source, on-premise offerings. SugarCRM does this now, and I think we’ll start to see this more often. The actuality is the service will be forcing enough to keep clients from bolting. But offering the safety blanket is worthwhile, even if no-one ever uses it ( and, overtly, I do not believe many will, because few are able or running their own cloud, and even less wish to ).

O’Grady concludes that “Whether opensource takes a role front and center is still to be seen, but is certain that it will–as it’s got to date–have a crucial role in shaping the cloud market to come.” How serious that role is basically up to us.