Page 139 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

O VERCOMING RESISTANCE T O THE CL OUD

decisions. When users are looking to move workloads between
the data center and the cloud, compatible virtual machine for-
mats will be an asset; incompatible ones, a drawback. The dif-
ferences between VMDK, VHD, and AMI are small. They could
be collapsed into one publicly referenced standard, allowing
ease of migration between clouds. But that would open the

dominant vendors to level playing field competition. I do not
expect to see such a thing happen until cloud computing be-
comes widely established and the locus of competition moves
to a new front. (For lock-in of a completely different sort, see
Appendix C. The editor of InformationWeek’s “Plug into the
Cloud” blog, John Foley, has illustrated how the unwary can
be locked into a cloud simply by the price of trying to move

one’s data out.)
One way to counter the vendor’s proprietary interest,
however, is for customers to form groups that list their own
preferences and use them to serve notice to the vendors. The
best form of pressure is a paying customer pointing out the ad-
vantage of ease of movement between clouds. If this mobility
is granted sooner rather than later, the immense potential of
cloud computing can be realized sooner as well, and I doubt
that competent vendors would be injured by such a develop-

ment. User groups often produce spokespersons who are
skilled at producing such a message.
In 2007, AMD’s director of software development, Mar-
garet Lewis, in a master stroke of stagecraft, if not statecraft,
put representatives of VMware, XenSource, and Microsoft on
stools on a raised platform at the end of a San Francisco virtu-
alization conference, then filmed the results. Each was asked

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