The word 'Cloud' comes with pleasant, dreamy connotations of openness, fluidity and freedom. Against a backdrop of endless financial and political turmoil, these are certainly agreeable concepts that have the added bonus of being genuinely linked to Cloud Computing, says Kevin Cochrane, CMO, Day Software.
We're big supporters of Cloud Computing and its potential to save businesses lots of money, improve collaboration and even slow down global warming. Our company was born in the Cloud generation and every aspect of our business reflects this, from our software deployment model to our development approach to our licensing structure.
However as with all great innovations that promise new commercial opportunities, the software industry's central casting department served up the same motley crew of charlatans, blinkered visionaries, fear mongers, clueless marketeers and acronym soup chefs whose combined effect on IT professionals can often be to neutralise any sense of optimism or clarity around said innovation.
As usual, none of these characters deserve to monopolise the stage completely but lately the fear mongers have captured the limelight and are successfully arguing the quite valid point that people who get too drunk on the Cloud hype could, if they're not careful, wind up locked up in jail. A recent report from Forrester entitled 'How Secure is Your Cloud' warned vendors to be wary of getting locked into Clouds in the same way they have been locked in the past into vendor architectures.
This is real. Each Cloud offers specific ways to build server images and proprietary APIs to take advantage of the 'elastic' storage it
provides. So oftentimes when a vendor promotes themselves as Cloud-friendly, they actually only support one particularly Cloud
infrastructure. One of our main competitors, for example, locks users in specifically to the Amazon Cloud. Software deployment is linked to
Amazon-specific server images and back-end data storage services.
What's the problem?
Why is that a problem? First of all, lock-in means you lose control of your costs. If Amazon raises its rates or another Cloud vendor offers
lower rates for bandwidth, server processing power or data storage, you really don't have any other option apart from a wholesale rebuild and costly migration. So much for openness, fluidity and freedom. Not to mention the cheap processing power and flexibility you went to Cloud for in the first place.
But before you run screaming to the fire exit, we'd like to welcome a promising young starlet onto the stage - the enlightened pragmatist. As with the eternal debate over prison reform, the so called enlightened viewpoint advocates prevention. Likewise, if you remove the incentive for vendor lock-in, then the whole problem slowly disappears.
A new generation of software vendors whose commercial models don't rely on lock-in to flourish are slowly gaining ground over the mainstream enterprise software players. At Day, we're passionate defenders of application portability and have taken this development philosophy into the Cloud. Through our industry-standard APIs, we completely abstract our applications from the underlying Cloud infrastructure so that customers can migrate web applications from one Cloud to the next. So we'll never impose the use of any Cloud-specific server images or proprietary storage APIs.
We even collaborate with worthy competitors like Nuxeo to advance open standards to drive interoperability because that's what customers increasingly demand. One such standard is CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services).
Why you should care about CMIS
There's a lot of alphabet soup surrounding the CMIS specification, but it is essentially concerned with check in/out and the ability to create,
read, update and delete a document anywhere. For larger organisations that might have several legacy systems that are hard coded into one or more central repositories, CMIS has obvious benefits. Day Software and Nuxeo didn't think the initial goals for CMIS were
ambitious enough and have joined forces on a project called 'Apache Chemistry' to produce a generic, Open Source reference implementation of the CMIS standard.
This project is hosted by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), a vendor-neutral, non-profit organization that has been at the heart of the open source movement since our Chief Scientist Roy Fielding incorporated Apache 10 years ago. Based on the fundamentals of an open, collaborative development model and a liberal-use open source licensing model, the Apache Software Foundation promotes joint development by independent software vendors in one single umbrella organization.
As an industry-led movement towards a new content management standard, CMIS represents an ideal candidate for a community-driven open source project supported by leading ECM vendors to create a common reference implementation that can be liberally incorporated into their product stacks with the business-friendly Apache licensing model. As founding members of the project, both Day Software and Nuxeo have contributed their own bespoke implementations of CMIS to create a common, unified implementation to create a larger, more vibrant developer community around CMIS that avoids risks associated with vendor lock-in.