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Cloud Computing: Third Party Software Worries
You probably know that until 2004 Google’s search engine powered Yahoo! and that now that privilege belongs to Microsoft’s new Bing search engine. Software powered by bits and pieces of software from other vendors isn’t anything new. With traditional software vendors, integrations or joint collaborations with so-called third-party vendors is very common. It isn’t a surprise then to find out that cloud-based software solutions have similar integrations and interdependencies with software components and services that have been developed and/or hosted by another vendor.
Adrien Bloem at CMS Watch recently pointed out some examples where online software interdependencies can cause problems when changes in the relationship with the third party vendor happen. He gave the example of Google buying a company called Picnik that makes an on-line image editor. Picnik is a component that has been used in Yahoo!’s Flickr. But the result of the acquisition is that Flickr now has a dependency on software owned by it’s competitor Google with a good probability that Yahoo won’t be treated to friendly contract terms when their current agreement is over, assuming that they even can renew.
Bloem also mentions the example of Docverse, a plugin product that allows collaboration on Windows documents. Google has also recently purchased Docverse, and similar to the example with Picnik, there are companies like Jive that use Docverse as part of their solution. With Jive competing in a space that Google is aggressively trying to win, they may find themselves facing a problem should they want to continue to use Docverse with Google as the owner.
While issues around integrations with third-party components isn’t anything new, these dependencies are perhaps better hidden from users than when the software is running on-premise. Which makes it all that much more important to do your due diligence when selecting vendors, whether they are providing cloud services or traditional on-premise software.
