A specter looms in boardrooms across the country: fears of vendor lock. As businesses in every sector navigate digital transformation, conversations are shifting from the importance of setting and executing a strategy to anxiety about being stuck with a specific vendor at some point in the future.
Vendor lock is a natural concern when vetting a new platform or solution for your organization. Given the business-critical nature of data, worries about lock-in are especially understandable when selecting a data management platform or cloud provider. No organization has a crystal ball, yet businesses want to anticipate the future—and be ready to change course as needed.
Vendor lock can limit your leverage to negotiate better pricing or service. It can also hamper your ability to adopt or adapt to new technology—either because it doesn’t integrate with your technology stack as it evolves, or because an integration would be challenging, expensive, or technically impractical.
With data platforms, however, this is the wrong way to think about vendor lock. It’s also the wrong approach to guaranteeing your organization can adapt to future changes.
Ironically, vendors that we hear most frequently talking about vendor lock are the ones whose products lead to the highest degree of vendor lock for their respective technology.
The reality is, organizations shouldn’t be concerned with vendor lock, they should be concerned with portability. When you commit to any technology platform, you are putting key functionality of your business into their proprietary product. No matter how a platform is marketed, degrees of vendor lock-in occur when a business commits to adopting it, as offboarding will likely require a lot of effort.
Companies must consider:
- How do I build my data architecture and products in a sustainable way that creates structure that’s easy to consume, extend, and possibly transfer?
- Which providers help me build in this way, making it easy to migrate off of the platform if necessary?
This approach liberates businesses from lock-in fears, while setting them up for continuous improvement.
Here’s what to look for in a technology platform or solution to remain agile:
Optimized and standardized code
Building your data architecture on a proper foundation is a critical first step in ensuring the continuity, availability, and portability of your infrastructure. That means using optimized, standardized code across your data platforms and solutions. When SQL generation is optimized and standardized across your data and business operations, it is much easier to resolve data accuracy and completeness concerns, identify further performance optimizations, and eliminate workload inefficiencies.
Optimized, standardized SQL not only enables operational efficiency in your current platform, it makes it easy to identify and eliminate concerns should you decide to change any of the products it powers. Further, when this optimization extends to metadata, understanding key relationships and context becomes easier, enabling data engineers to spend less time on troubleshooting and duplicating years’ worth of work during migration.
Ultimately, it comes down to automating most, if not all, of the manual code-writing that brings your data together.
Automation
Imagine a platform where all code was manually written, year after year, by different engineers with varying skill levels and experience. It’s almost guaranteed that you would be looking at a heaping portion of spaghetti code, unwieldy and disorganized, and likely customized to the unique preferences of developers who may have long ago moved on from your company. This can hamstring efforts to move off of one data platform and onto another.
Organizations should instead seek out platforms that automate most code generation, eliminating the potential for human error and personal biases. Automation eliminates the risks of relying on tribal knowledge and the need to manually parse through mountains of code to prepare it for migration, alleviating one of the most time-consuming parts of such initiatives.
Portability
The biggest bottleneck with any migration is comprehending and adjusting the code that has been produced by your current platform to the new one. If you have poorly written code, moving to a new platform necessitates first and foremost parsing all of that to understand what has been built. Supporting multiple platforms doesn’t solve the portability challenge. Code automation and standardization, as outlined above, does.
A key aspect of portability is having thorough, accurate, and always up-to-date documentation. Documentation naturally facilitates the understanding, interpretation, transformation, and use of a product, along with its use cases, requirements, authorizations, restrictions, or prohibitions. But when it isn’t obligatory or standardized through automation, documentation can become sloppy, inconsistent, or downright nonexistent.
Seeking out tools that automatically produce documentation as developers work not only takes a tedious task off their plate, but also ensures that documentation is created for every data pipeline or transformation. There are no missing pieces or context should the time come for engineers to migrate to a new platform. You are more locked into a vendor’s product if it supports other platforms but lacks documentation than a solution that doesn’t support other platforms but automatically creates thorough, up-to-date documentation to support any necessary migration.
Freedom is in the details
When it comes to business readiness, it’s critical to avoid becoming so blocked by fears of lock-in that you miss out on the powerful benefits of investing in new technology. Step back and ask yourself if your chosen solution standardizes and optimizes code while automatically generating consumable documentation—if it does, you’re ahead of the game.
For many businesses, the desire for flexibility can be at odds with the operational realities that bind them to specific vendors. At Coalesce, we’ve developed our data transformation platform to work with Snowflake because we believe in the technology’s unique advantages and are on a mission to keep innovating (more on that here). This choice is the opposite of vendor lock. It speaks to our commitment to operating in a dynamic landscape that requires agility, foresight, and commitment to ongoing development, which we believe at this time is most achievable with Snowflake.
Our partners enjoy a high degree of freedom and adaptability because we’ve built our platform on the belief that consistent and well-documented data is liberated from specific platforms and can be applied—and moved—across systems. Find out how we can support you at every stage of your business evolution.
