In the last few days, two very different companies announced two very different acquisitions. LogMeIn acquired LastPass for $125m whereas Dell made a colossal purchase of EMC at $63.1bn.
When one of your favourite providers is acquired, it can probably be likened to when your daughter introduces you to the man she wants to marry. He’ll never be good enough or live up to your expectations. I can imagine many column inches (blog pixels?) will be dedicated to the Dell-EMC deal in the coming days, and I haven’t really fully formed out my thoughts around what it means quite yet.
There is an interesting narrative that has emerged from the LastPass acquisition. Many users were not to happy about the acquisition – expressing dissatisfaction in how LogMeIn treated them in the past and it prompted Troy Hunt to pen a post detailing how one could migrate to 1Password.
So the question is – how prepared are you if your cloud-based provider suddenly decides to run off with the lead singer in the band? Even at the consumer level, there are many challenges to being able to migrate from one provider to another. I’d have to find an alternative provider that was within the same price range, I trusted, could support all the devices and OS’s I run, have similar functionality and so on.
Security has a comparatively hard sell in the SaaS world – building up trust takes time. Even then, you can never fully let your guard down and fully commit to one provider for critical services – as Frank Underwood would say, Shake hands of SaaS with your right hand, but hold a rock in your left.
Javvad Malik 