Analysis: The broken cloud

Things are, fortunately, getting better for file formats.

Microsoft has published a specification for the Office file format. All the big calendaring programs now support the iCalendar format. We’re even down to about three popular image formats.

I suspect that the internet is largely to thank for this; once everyone actually had to deal with each other’s files on a regular basis, standards started to seem like a really good idea.

Sadly, we’re quite close to repeating the exact same multi-decade cycle of pain again; this time in the cloud.

In the report we cover twenty cloud providers across five industry groups: Sales/CRM, Office Communication, Collaboration/Project Management, Accounting, and HR. How many formats would you expect to have to research to figure out if these solutions can integrate with each other?

If you answered somewhere between five and twenty, as I did, you’re very wrong.

In fact, there are almost no standards at all. If you want to find out which providers integrate with which, you have to check each pair individually.

There are about two hundred complex interactions to analyse to even get close to knowing which solutions could potentially work best together.

I'm only grateful we weren't assessing the top 50 SaaS providers -- that would be more than 1200 things to study.

If this complexity only affected the job I was asked to do, it wouldn’t be such a big deal. But this is research done on a daily basis by rapidly greying IT managers around the country.

They need this information to work out which services to choose, and if they get it wrong the consequences can be expensive.

Marketplaces aren't a solution

A number of cloud providers, big ones in particular, have jury-rigged a solution on top of this integration mess. That solution is called a cloud marketplace: a place where third party vendors can sell pre-built custom integrations to their beleaguered customers who just want the thing to work.

Nice idea, but in fact it just makes the whole thing worse.

Now instead of just asking “does AwesomeCRM integrate with Cool Dude Accounting?”, you have to ask “does AwesomeCRM integrate with Cool Dude Accounting on its own? Does it integrate via a third party? Which of their marketplaces is it listed on? Do I trust the third party too? How do I choose if there’s more than one?”

That’s not to say marketplaces aren't useful. They are a great way of collecting third-party additions to a cloud service and making it easier for customers to add functionality.

But providers should never use them to mask holes in core functionality. Any cloud provider who doesn’t treat “working as part an entire cloud IT stack” as core functionality is ignoring the real needs of their customers.

How to fix it

The fix is actually pretty simple. We just need standards. Not standards for file formats, but standards for cloud data. Standards that anyone can use to integrate with anyone else.

The SaaS industry needs to agree on a CRM standard, an HR standard, an Accounting standard. There needs to be new standards bodies, or standards around SaaS need to be submitted to the old ones.

Either way, the only solution is to work together. Microsoft and Netscape/Mozilla didn’t with web browsers, and progress on web standards languished for nearly a decade. We can do better.

Some existing standards are already becoming popular in the cloud space. I mentioned iCalendar before. It’s already used by all the big cloud calendar providers.

Same with the IMAP standard for email. That means any provider who wants to integrate with cloud email only has to write one integration.

But there are only a few of these, mostly in services, like calendaring, that have been online for a while. Time is running out to standardise the rest before the corporate and government worlds sign up en masse.

If you’re in the market for cloud services, make sure to ask your prospective providers, “do you support a standard cloud data format for integration?” and into their confused silence interject, “Do you have a timeline for supporting one? It’s important to us that our Cloud services are standards-based.”

If enough people ask, providers will listen.

The cloud has the potential to be so much better than what came before. To make IT easier and cheaper for companies and let them focus on what they really want to be doing: running their businesses well.

This is an opportunity to start with a fresh slate. Let’s not waste it.

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