NetApp is rubbing its paws with glee as its rivals lock their customers into their cloud services.
The company told its Insight technical conference in Berlin that there was gigantic opportunity for it to help customers who are struggling with rival tech firms who make it hard to leave their cloud services.
The storage vendor said many cloud offerings may look good on paper but become problematic and this gives it and its channel the chance to better serve those customers.
Joel Reich, NetApp’s senior vice president for product operations told a media press conference that cloud providers were using techniques that hark back to the 1970s.
“Most service providers will be glad to help you get into their cloud, but they’re not that helpful in trying to help you get out of their cloud. If you were to look at one of the popular backup applications for cloud, it costs little to archive your data in something like Amazon Glacier, but it costs exponentially more to get it out.”
This goes back to proprietary computer operating systems where it was someone’s goal to actually try to lock you into that proprietary operating system, Reich said.
Lock-ins were used by some cloud providers means customers have a hard time moving between services if and when a provider’s technology, price or strategy changes.
He said such tactics are actually a great selling point for his firm because customers really don’t want this lock in. They want to make the right choice for their business, not one that is based on one set of technologies that a particular cloud vendor has in play.
