One of the most risky and, quite frankly, annoying aspects of cloud computing is the dependency on other businesses.  Businesses fail, of course, but also executives at businesses you depend on may make seemingly wacky decisions.  Oftentimes, these decisions affect customers in a negative way.  I got a taste of this firsthand this week as Nuance announced that they'd be shutting down Jott by early next month.

Jott was a service that provided intelligent voice to text transcription.  While there are many company offering similar services, Jott's service was different in that it provided interfaces to other applications.  Jott's ability to send an email or text message by voice was an invaluable aid while driving.  Jott's ability to sent appointments by voice to Google Calendars was another great feature. Jott offered integration to Salesforce.com and Jott offered an st1:stocktickerAPI/st1:stockticker that could be used to interface it to virtually any other application.  Several of my clients have been using Jott to process reports and orders from their sales and field service teams.  For them Jott became an essential part of their business.<!--break-->

For myself and my clients, the impending shutdown of Jott is very disruptive.  It will force us to scramble for alternative solutions or modify the ways we do business.  For at lease one of my clients, it's been the catalyst to encourage them to re-evaluate whether cloud-based /SaaS (software as a service) solutions are their cup of tea. 

The acquisition in 2009 of Jott by Nuance was widely seen as a positive move.  Nuance was a larger and presumably more stable company and the presumption was that this would be good for the future of the Jott service. 

Nuance has even gone as far as to claim in their announcement of it's demise that Jott was a success, and taking down the service was merely a way to pave the way for more innovative offerings.  It appears Nuance is going to try to sell it's technologies to carriers such as AT&T and Verizon.  I suspect that they didn't want their own offerings to compete.

Regardless of the business reasons Nuance may have had for shutting down the Jott service, there are lessons to be learned from it.  The business risks of depending on cloud-based/SaaS solutions can be partially mitigated by obtaining SLAs (service level agreements) that specify how much notice a company must give before shutting down services.  It's also important to do contingency planning and periodic assessment and re-evaluation of alternatives for cloud-based services and resources.  IT departments and individuals alike, have historically been notoriously poor at vendor risk management.  In the era of cloud-computing vendor risk management becomes one of the crucial keys to enjoying the benefits offered in the clouds, without harmful disruption.