What is Vendor Lock-In?

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Vendor lock-in occurs when a company is constrained to a single vendor because the associated cost of switching to another company is too high and impractical. Vendor lock-in may force you to continue using a particular product or service regardless of its quality. This is because switching away from that product or service would be too costly, too time-consuming, or too complex.

Vendor lock-in most frequently occurs in cloud computing, where users sign up for cloud-based software platforms but are consequently unable to move their data to different service provider platforms. According to Flexera, 68% of the CIOs (Chief Information Officers) surveyed worried about vendor lock-in with regards to the public cloud. But even though the threat of vendor lock-ins looms over the cloud computing industry, there are easy steps you can take to altogether avoid them. Read more

What do Chief Executives Think About Digital Transformation?

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Digitization – the gleaming word appears to be a brilliant opportunity for most people, given the current circumstances. However, there’s a number of people who look upon it as an intimidating challenge to cope up with. Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed ground-breaking developments in the technology sector. Undoubtedly, they have had a strong impact on the cut-throat competition existing in the various business verticals. Be in healthcare or finance, businesses across the globe are acutely aware of the dire need of adopting digital transformation in today’s times. But things are not so black and white. Let’s understand this through an executive’s perspective. Read more

What is The Meaning of Digital Sovereignty?

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With a radical shift towards the digital world, every organization and individual amongst us is witnessing a drastic change. The digital transformation is leading us towards being more and more absorbed in the digital world – a world that rules on the idea of connectivity and sharing of data and information. When we turn digital, we become inclusive of the entities and activities that generate data. But who owns this data? Does it have something to do only with the technologists or the authorities? Or is it every individual’s responsibility to hold accountability for their digital footprint?

This article will give you a more in-depth insight into the answers to such questions. Read more

What is Smart Government?

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A quick search of Google reveals many different definitions and interpretations of smart government. Most focus on the notion that a government is a smart government when they use technology to draw together and align information resources and workflows in public administrations. As the open-source Low-Code Development platform, Crust goes further, however.

Crust Low-Code is Ideally Positioned to Realise Smart Government Projects

Government bodies have to deal with many different technological matters. For example:

  • Cloud Case Management
  • ERP in Education and Smart Schooling
  • Customer Service Solution
  • Customer Management System
  • Digital Transformations
  • Digital Sovereignty
  • Enterprise Messaging
  • Accessibility Standards
  • CRM for Hospitals
  • Army CRM
  • Communication Service Solutions
  • IoT Dashboards and Smart City Infrastructures

Read more

How do we Implement Government Digital Transformation?

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Government digital infrastructures are renowned for being:

  • Rich in data
  • Complex
  • Full of legacy systems
  • Not joined up

Of course, it’s not all true. It can’t be. For example, cities such as Barcelona and Amsterdam are known for having forward-looking IT postures. The governments of states such as Germany and Singapore have excellent reputations when it comes to technological outlook. Read more

What is a Digital Transformation Strategy?

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I was recently asked this question and at the same time asked to explain what free CRMs have to do with the subject of digital transformation. Naturally, we here believe that Planet Crust’s CRM is the best free CRM on the market, providing the market-leading open source Salesforce alternative. However, more importantly, we provide a low code platform that rivals “Lightning”, the Salesforce rapid application development offering in every facet. CRM is just the tip of the iceberg – with the Corteza low code platform we can build just about any type of records-centric web applications. Read more

In celebrating “Digital Sovereignty”, we will be judged by the quality of the software we produce, not our fine words.

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Crust Technology recently had the pleasure of taking part in the Univention Summit in Bremen, Germany. The Univention Corporate Server (UCS) is a leading platform for cost-efficient operation and easy administration of server applications and entire IT infrastructures. It is both self-hosted and open source and is used by many recognisable, brand-name organisations. UCS is an excellent OS base upon which to build your Digital Sovereignty, being practical, feature complete and supportive of multi-vendor environments.

Digital Sovereignty is a complex term, implying unimpeded access to the software code (i.e. 100% open source), default support and promotion of federated architectures, control of data location and consistent cross-jurisdictional regulation. While vendors such Univention point the way at the infrastructural level, software manufacturers at the application layer must pick up the baton with equal enthusiasm and determination.

In practical terms, what might this mean for software application vendors?

  1. Be 100% open
    This means no tricks or games. Every line of code must be available to the using or hosting organisation. But it goes even further than that – application architectures must be clear, well-documented and not a source of data lock-in themselves.
  1. Easy E-Migration
    The cost of migrating away from a solution, self-hosted or otherwise, must be as low as possible. In other words, the software must be built with recognition of the principle that the using organisation has a fundamental and exclusive right to “own” all of their data and that, should they wish, this data can be moved away from the platform easily.
  2. Embrace Standards
    From security to communication to API’s, software must be standards-based and must, in so far as possible, facilitate federation with other software and services. Clouds should be capable of collaborating with eachother, irrespective of the language in which they are coded.
  3. User Experience (UX) must be excellent
    Good UX leads to strong adoption. Failing at this first hurdle is unforgiveable. It has now been proven umpteenth times that solutions with poor UX simply do not get adopted by a population of a meaningful size.

Credibility is key. Businesses and governments pushing for Digital Sovereignty must learn from history. It’s littered with defunct open source providers, who failed to deliver compelling alternatives to components of giant data-harvesting clouds and proprietary software manufacturers. To fail again would be to be laughed off the stage, while the use of data from our corporate champions, mittelstand (mid-sized economic actors) and small businesses drifts further and further from our control. The stakes are that high.

Do you want to take the first step to Digital Sovereignty? Give Univention’s UCS a try and set up Crust using their Univention App Center.

About Crust

Crust Technology Ltd, headquartered in Ireland, is the driving force behind the open-source Unified Work platform Crust, providing a flexible, self-hosted platform for your organisation to work and communicate internally while engaging with its customers, suppliers, partners and other third parties externally. Its integrated approach to identity, messaging and business logic delivers a simple-to-use yet extensible means for managing users and the applications they require every day, whether in the cloud, behind the firewall or a hybrid of the two. For more information, visit www.planetcrust.com or follow @Crusttech on Twitter.