Not all vendors selling cloud computing services have developed a commercial licensing model to match, which means that potential customers must agree entry and exit strategies upfront or risk being locked in.
This was one of the key recommendations made by Paul Cheesborough, chief information officer at News International during a panel discussion entitled ‘Cloud and the CIO’ at the Business Cloud Summit in London today.
The publishing house, which has introduced Google’s personal productivity applications across the business, warned that “you have to be a bit wary” because, in the case of many of the traditional on premise software vendors “all roads lead to traditional licensing deals” rather than the more flexible arrangements so often promised. Such arrangements include pay-as-you-go or paying per number of users who access a given application at any one time.
This situation meant that it was crucial for potential customers to plan carefully and ensure that suppliers, rather than “pitching a three-year lock-in”, were “embracing the true cloud business model” instead, Cheesborough said.
The problem, in many instances however, was that vendors’ “business models were counter-intuitive to the cloud model”, which made it difficult to do anything in a one-off or ad hoc manner.
This scenario often came about due to conflict between product development and sales teams, the latter of whom had made a lot of money in the past from traditional site-wide licensing agreements and the like, Cheesborough said.
But David Jack, CIO of The Trainline online ticket booking system, advised that “one-size-doesn’t-fit-all” and, therefore, it made sense to put two vendors into competition against on another. “The key thing is having a vendor in the wings. If you’ve not taken the first steps, your existing vendor will be happy to drive down the costs to keep you as a customer,” he said.
The organisation, which also runs 14 of the UK’s 18 train operating companies’ web sites, has implemented a private cloud infrastructure, but intends to adopt public cloud services over time.
“Our internal development and test and production environment has been virtualised, which is a step towards the public cloud and we’ll move there when, economically, it makes sense,” Jack said. “Right now though, we run our cloud privately and reduce the risk because if there’s a problem, it’s our problem.”
