Vendor Lockin
In a fictional drama based on characters of the great epic Mahabharatha, a Telugu poet/dramatist Mr. Chilakamarthi Lakshmi Narasimham, talks of a great war, which was averted at the last moment due to intervention of Gods. The story goes this way Gaya, a Gandharva King (Gandharvas can be considered “being of heaven”) was moving across the skies and spat the pan. It fell into the open palms of Sri Krishna (An Avatar of Lord Vishnu), praying to the sun god Surya. Sri Krishna gets very angry and vows to kill him. Then the Gandharva king, being a great devotee of Krishna, begs him for mercy and Krishna doesn’t concede.
Narada (Son of Lord Bramha, a divine sage) advises Gaya to approach Arjuna (one of the Pandava brothers of epic Mahabharatha) and first seek his assurance of protecting him and only then reveal the name of person out to take his life. The king does the same and after taking Arjuna’s promise to protect him, he reveals that Krishna has set out to kill him. Arjuna is surprised and yet sticks to his vow. It might be noted that the friendship and relation between Arjuna and Krishna is supposed to that of ideal relation between Nara (human) and Narayana (God).
Any number of dialogues between Arjuna and Krishna make no dent to their respective vows, Arjuna to protect Gaya and Krishna’s to kill Gaya, resulting in an impending war between the both. Those days, unlike now, word given by self was considered paramount than life of self.
Almost when they are out for a head on collision, Lord Siva (an important Hindu Deity, and one of the Trinity) appears before them and averts a possible disaster to the world. This is later explained by the Lord Krishna as a test for Arjuna before the impending Mahabharata war. [For details about Mahabharatha etc. please Google.]
Though the preceding is a drama, a fiction, it shows the lock-in of the people about the words they give. Isn’t it similar to the vendor lock-in. Once an Enterprise goes to a vendor, they are locked-in, with no way out.
For any Enterprise IT, there are three layers, which form the IT stack, starting with Hardware (H/W), Operating System (OS), Applications (Apps); along with “Services” for these layers in form of Infrastructure Support and ADM.
- The first such vendors to provide single stop shop (Single Window) for all Enterprise IT layers’ needs was/is IBM, with their H/W, OS and Apps along with their own consulting unit (GCS), which can take care of the “Services”.
- With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle too now has H/W, OS, Apps and “Services” via acquisition of I-flex, Hexaware and their own consulting division et al.
- Microsoft has a long relation with Intel to the extent that WinTel is known moniker in the Enterprise world. Together, they form a formidable force, with many regional “Service” providers.
- SAP has it’s own Apps and “Services” and for sake of OS they “might” acquire Novell or Redhat, get into a tie up with HP for H/W thus completing their “Single Window”.
Any lock-in has its merits and also comes with its baggage of limitations. The merit being, Management can delegate all the needs to the Enterprise IT to the “vendor” and take care of their primary business that of serving their customers.
A case in point is Bharathi Airtel of India (a large Telecom provider of India), where the Enterprise IT is handled by IBM, the networking needs are handled by Alcatel and Siemens, which the management just focuses on the needs of their customers. Their customer share of Indian mobile/telecom market is around 61%. (Market share source Internet)
The limitation is that the CIO does not get the best of the breed, like she cannot cherry pick from each of the vendor based on the needs of organization. If a vendor is good in one area of specialization and not so good in another area, they need to live that as they are locked in.
How to avoid the stalemate, would give us two solutions.
*One *- going the cloud way, where the applications are never owned, but rented. H/W, OS and “Services” are minimal as in an ideal Cloud world, “Internet would be the Computer” and the device used would be more or less like an erstwhile “dumb terminal”. As a by-line to this, the device that goes around today as a “smart phone” is less of a phone and more of the step towards Cloud. Most of these “smart phones” are used more for accessing the “applications” over Internet than for making the voice calls, more for sending “messages” and “mails” than having a “small talk”.
There is a catch in this approach, not all the applications are “Cloud Ready”, however as a first step towards “Cloud Way” the social networking applications have their “Apps” on these devices. In near future we may all be using devices with have just network capabilities with little or no OS, H/W from a vendor neutral supplier, but capability to download the “real” OS and the “Enterprise Application” that the user plans to use. Then Google/Amazon/Gen-Z-Co would be the rivals, with the traditional players in the Enterprise IT World being the second rung players, unless they sit up and look into the approaching thunder storm as clouds are already visible on the horizon.
*Two *- Till the time, we get into tomorrow’s Cloud, we can still have best of breed with CIO cherry-picking the application from different vendors for this Enterprise. We can integrate them to work as a seamless engine to support the business drivers of the Enterprise.
This is where we at Infosys can come into picture, to help you reach tomorrow by paving way today. For more information about Infosys’s plans for “Building Tomorrow’s Enterprise” please take a quick look at our Annual Report.
