Is interoperability a major sticking point?
Absolutely – we’re already seeing that the heterogeneity that existed in the datacentre with different operating systems and hardware platforms, takes on a whole new meaning, when you’re dealing with third-party providers. Different sets of application programming interfaces, lack of standards today and different service levels are all part of the problem. As a management vendor, one of the things that we’ve done over the past 28 years is develop software that manages disparate and heterogeneous environments, whether it runs a distributed system, mainframe, or a virtual system – or now in a cloud environment. One of the advantages to managing hardware and services like this is that it avoids lock-in. An important point that many clients feel about cloud computing is around the lock-in aspect. They go with a stack vendor and build their applications on that, and they feel their management and everything is tied to that sole provider. So if anything better comes along, they feel they are
