The Real Role Vendors Play in College Cloud Networks

With more colleges moving to the Cloud, they should consider how involved they want vendors to be during the transition.

Vendors speak a special language.

It’s an information technology dialect that most educational institutions can’t fathom, but that they respect nonetheless. Colleges have to turn to experts after all, since they don’t specialize in tech. However, they tend to cut vendors some slack – one of the reasons why IT types aren’t really proficient in their line of work, either.

What inspired this riff is “Complicating the Cloud,” a recent, insightful article by industry guru Jeff Kaplan. Kaplan makes a number of trenchant points in his article, many of them coalescing around the idea that the vendor community has a vested interest in complexity.

Read full story