The cloud is supposed to help organizations embrace best of breed applications for their needs. Cloud is supposed to make suite based approach to software consumption irrelevant. Cloud is supposed to enable best of breed without the integration mess of the traditional software era. But it looks like the opposite is happening, especially when it comes to social. The very idea of social business is to break down the silos inside the organization and help improve collaboration is creating silos elsewhere. I thought I will briefly touch upon this topic in this post.
When SaaS started gaining stream, it appeared organizations could take advantage of best of breed cloud applications that fits their needs. In fact, some of the integration platforms made it so easy to integrate SaaS from different vendors that there were widespread expectations that vendor lock-in will be a thing of past. However, I am starting to wonder whether this is not going to be the case in the future. I would cite the following two developments as culprits.
As SaaS adoption increased and certain vendors gained dominance in the enterprise market, they started thinking about a Suite approach as a way to take on traditional enterprise software vendors. They are in a position to integrate social into all their apps, thereby, avoiding silos and offering tighter integration between the app and social layer.
As social gained traction and became critical part of every enterprise cloud application (see out position paper defining the five attributes of enterprise cloud applications), we started seeing social features inside the best of breed applications.
These two trends are pushing us to a situation where organizations are forced to decide between forgoing the social features offered by the vendors or buying a suite from a vendor who integrates social across all their applications in a seamless way. For example, when Box announced a partnership with Tibbr few months back, the conversations happening around content inside of Box were not pulled into Tibbr. Unless an organization enforces a policy of not allowing their employees to have conversation using social features of Box (a best of breed application which I am using as an example to highlight my point) and find a way to prevent it effectively, we are going to see conversations scattered across many different properties. In most cases, looking at how these best of breed vendors are doing integration, there are chances for some of the conversations to get lost.
Unless we see vendors working together to ensure deeper compatibility of functionality through their respective APIs, organizations are forced to look at single vendor suites. As we saw in the traditional software world, adopting suite based applications implies vendor lock-in (which is an expensive proposition). This is clearly a dilemma got organizations wanting to use modern applications with social technologies. Social Silos, a term I want to use for conversations that are swept under the carpet during integration, are bad and it doesn’t help organizations achieve better efficiency through best of breed services and social. What do you think?
Director, OpenShift Strategy at Red Hat. Founder of Rishidot Research, a research community focused on services world. His focus is on Platform Services, Infrastructure and the role of Open Source in the services era. Krish has been writing @ CloudAve from its inception and had also been part of GigaOm Pro Analyst Group. The opinions expressed here are his own and are neither representative of his employer, Red Hat, nor CloudAve, nor its sponsors.
