In your opinion, what could cloud providers do to truly address cloud lock-in concerns and give you more flexibility as a customer?
There are a lot of benefits to the customer from what I prefer to call vendor strategic partnership: POTI stabilisation, skills enhancement, customised solution development (where appropriate), economies of scale, focused customer support and integrated ecosystem benefits.
I have been on the "customer" side of the software market for over 20 years and am not in any way representing for any software vendor. These views come from experience. I'll take vendor lock-in anyday. And the most common argument I have had inside the organisation is how we don't consider for custom development, or the architecture and integration knowledge in-house to be the same as vendor lock-in.
I agree with Paul on this one. From my perspective vendor lock-in sits directly opposite to being able to drive competitive advantage through a vendor's capabilities and innovation. If you don't invest into it, then you will never reap the rewards. I don't think a sound strategy would be to invest in a technology with a primary benefit of being able to leave that technology at any given time.
I would also challenge the idea that vendors create that lock-in. Working with database technology, an area which is always accused of lock-in, it's not straight forward. If you want to be easily get data out of a database then you need to look at what's more important, vendor lock-in or security! Pretty much all vendors have the ability to move/change/alter data, there are more ETL/ELT tools out there to do that. The complications of applications, platforms and an organisations own processes, management and goals, makes vendor lock relatively simple to achieve compared to all the other things that sit around that technology.