In this month’s On the Spot, Brainstorm exercised its curiosity about virtualisation and vendor lock-in, asking: How worried are end-users about vendor lock-in? The answers, as usual, depended on who was replying.

• Enterprises, long stung by expensive lock-in deals with software vendors, say they’re loathe to lock themselves into any one vendor’s vision or technology. The industry has given IT departments little assurance that once a company’s data sits in, say, an IS cloud, that they will someday be able to port that data to another cloud. Although VMware has publicly announced that its customers will eventually be able to work with all public cloud providers, there’s a lot of work to be done. Customers are right to be worried about being locked in, which is why virtualisation companies are putting an emphasis on federation among cloud service providers. Dione Le Roux, GM, Infrastructure Systems Business Unit, AL Indigo