Gregor Petri, research director at Gartner, is warning enterprises to look out for vendor lock-in as the cloud computing market matures. “As long as the supplier still has his sights set on expanding its market share, lock-in is often not a problem,” he said. “But by the time the revenue from the installed base becomes more important than winning new customers, customers often start to encounter regular price increases, increasingly stringent terms of use and less responsiveness from its vendor.”
Petri explained, “Just imagine a scenario of a typical cloud provider, who controls the entire stack from application to hardware, unexpectedly going out of business or if that provider decides it does not want to serve a certain company or country anymore.” He added, “Any good cloud strategy must start and end with an exit strategy.”
