Pred-ICT-ion: Cloud data will be separated to avoid vendor lockin at platform level

In an article 'Cloud interoperability: Problems and best practices' of Computerworld, June 1st, 2011, Bill Claybrook states 'As more applications find their way to the cloud, data portability and other issues are coming to the fore'.
Data portability, by nature, is a platform issue, for the technical data format is usually optimized for the software that manage that data. To solve this problem we already have seen many initiatives, like SQL and XML. However, we need a more semantic format that descibes data in a way that is technologically agnostic and rich enough to describe the peculiar differences of the many datamodeling techniques. No abstraction but a formal description. Business intelligence companies have the knowledge to define such a standard, because they have experience with a variety of technologies for their ETL-tools.

And when the standard is in place, why not separate your data from your cloud software provider? This will solve both the portability issues and the vendor lockin.
My prediction is, that before 2020 data is separated from applications and freedom of choice for Software-as-a-Service is no longer limited because of the data portability issue.

IDC: PaaS the "next cloud battleground"

A pred-ICT-ion from IDC in Worldwide Public Cloud Platform as a Service 2009Vendor Shares ($). Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) will be the next battleground after Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) becoming mature. I agree with that, although before companies will invest in PaaS, the business models have to be changed to support Software-as-a-Service. Not the technological aspects like multitenancy, but the subscriptionmodels and service levels.

In my humble opinion, the SaaS battle has to be settled before the PaaS battle can begin.