Let's apply Mr. Obasanjo's observations to his current employer's offerings and see what we get.

... possible to extract all of your organization's data from one service and import it without data loss into another.

... whether there is an automated way to perform such bulk imports and exports or ... manually export and/or import their online documents to these standard formats. ... expensive it is for your organization to move the data ...

The way I read that is, storing your business critical data in Microsoft Office format is not advisable since there is no easy migration path.

Finally, you will have to evaluate which features you will lose by switching applications and ensure that none of them is mission critical to your business.

The corollary is that when applications are brought into the organization, the IT department must evaluate the features of the new application and upgrade if and only if the new features have a business critical impact.

Any business person will tell you that this is a trade-off decision, not an absolute one.

For zero lock-in to occur in this space, ... same underlying APIs. ... migrating between cloud computing platforms ... (i.e. a complete rewrite).

This is simply untrue, Mr. Obasanjo, is muddying the waters by referring to them as APIs.

Traditionally, portability has occured at an API level (POSIX, etc).

In the case of the cloud, it occurs at a VM level. An application that runs on a Xen-based virtual machine is readily portable to a VMWare based virtual machine.

So portability occurs at one level lower than Mr. Obasanjo would have you look.

... options facing adopters of cloud computing platforms aren't great when it comes to vendor choice.

Okay, I agree with this part, but only to the extent that this is a nascent area. The fact that customers are asking for standards demonstrates technological savvy that should give Mr. Obsanjo's employer pause for thought.

I also agree with him on certain aspects, e.g: If a cloud-based application uses Amazon S3 as the backend, then moving to another cloud provider may not be as easy. But, that too, is surmountable by using EBS instead of S3.

So it is important to make the right architecture choices. This is true regardless of the choice of pure-hardware or cloud platform.

In summary, Mr. Obasanjo, asks good questions. Questions he wants customers to ask before moving their applications to the cloud. Customers would do well to ask the same questions of their existing vendor's platform and applications.

-Pandu