Vendor lock-in a major concern

Johannesburg, 22 Jul 2004

Vendor lock-in on a combined hardware and software stack is one of the major concerns for IT departments, recent research has indicated.

According to Mark Seager, chief technologist for Veritas` EMEA region, his company recently conducted research that involved interviewing the IT department heads of 810 companies with more than 500 staff and a heterogeneous data centre environment, across the globe.

"According to the results for the EMEA region, the vast majority of these IT heads are strongly opposed to the concept of vendor lock-in," says Seager, who was speaking at the Veritas Vision conference, held at the Sandton Sun.

Vendor lock-in occurs when a customer is dependent on a vendor for products and services, and cannot move elsewhere without incurring substantial costs. It involves a lack of compatibility between different systems, which forces a customer to continue using products from a particular vendor.

"Some 67% actually believe that hardware vendors try to lock them in, while 90% identified numerous disadvantages that come with obtaining both hardware and software from the same vendor."

He says one of the disadvantages identified was the fact that their companies lost both the ability to shop around and the power to negotiate, while another problem was that getting everything from one vendor meant they lost their awareness of new technology that was developed at other vendors.

"This is why Veritas has adopted the heterogeneous approach to software development," he says.

"The world today has complex data centre environments, and this is something we will never get away from. However, being locked into a single vendor limits a company`s ability to react to industry changes and affects an organisation`s flexibility."