“A strategy that will work for the new cloud providers is to focus on a vertical industry / application and provide a deeper and more complete solution than the big guys currently provide,” noted Jeff Tabor, Senior Director of Product Management at Avere Systems, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo conference chairs Larry Carvalho and Vanessa Alvarez. “After succeeding in one vertical, move on to the next vertical to grow the business.”
Cloud Computing Journal: How are cloud standards playing a role in expanding adoption among users? Are standards helping new business models for service providers?
Jeff Tabor: Standards always help users since with standards the users don’t have to treat all the vendors as separate entities. Standards can eliminate vendor lock-in and give users bargaining power since multiple vendors can sell them technically equivalent solutions. Standards create an ecosystem of users and vendors that allow new business models to get started. Without this ecosystem, there is too much risk that users will head down the wrong vendor-proprietary path and new businesses can’t get off the ground.