Vendor Lockin

You Should Be Free To Leave

November 8, 2023
  •  
3 min read time
George Hill
Sagitto Ltd

Vendor lock-in happens when a customer becomes dependent on a vendor for products or services and cannot easily switch to another vendor without substantial costs or inconvenience. This can happen with SaaS (Software as a Service) providers, especially if they use proprietary technologies or data formats that make it hard for customers to migrate their data or applications to another platform. Here are some of the ways that we aim to help our corporate customers avoid the worst aspects of 'vendor lock-in' when using our services.

1. Try Before You Commit

Opening a Corporate Account with Sagitto is asking our customers to make a significant financial and operational commitment to us. To help ensure that it is the right decision, we encourage our customers to start with one of our Explorer Accounts. As their name suggests, Explorer Accounts are designed for those who want to try Sagitto with minimal commitment. And one excellent way of evaluating Sagitto, both from a technical and business perspective, is to open an Explorer Account and have us benchmark some of your current NIR calibration models.

2. Your Data Is Always Accessible

We keep a copy of all
- your spectral and reference data,
- the full training set that we create from these, and
- the cross-validation results from each time we rebuild your models.

These are stored in a private Github repository that only we (Sagitto) and a designated member of your organisation has access to. We encourage you to regularly clone this data repository to a secure location within your own network, so that you always have a copy of it. We are happy to suggest ways that this can be done regularly in an automated fashion.

3. Data In A Common Format

It's not enough for your data to be always accessible. It also needs to be in a format that you can use. We make your data available in both its original format, but also in CSV format that can be read by many different software programs.

4. A Pathway

In providing easy access to all your data in a readily consumable format, we aim to provide you with a pathway should you decide to no longer use Sagitto's services. There are several ways in which we can assist you to have ongoing access to models, with various degrees of independence of Sagitto. These range from Sagitto-built models running in an Azure account that you control, to completely new models running locally on a computer in your network. We're very happy to discuss the option that will best meet your requirements for business continuity, disaster recovery, and minimisation of vendor lock-in.

We believe that our customers should subscribe to our services willingly, because of the value that they receive and not because they are locked in to using us.

While we hope it doesn't happen, if you do decide to cease using Sagitto's services then rest assured that we will do every thing we can to ease the path to saying goodbye.

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George Hill
Sagitto Ltd
Sagitto's founder, George Hill, first started working with artificial intelligence during the 1980s, while developing 'expert systems' within Bank of America in London. On returning to New Zealand, he undertook part-time study with the University of Waikato's Machine Learning Group while working for Hill Laboratories, a well-known New Zealand commercial testing laboratory. This led to the formation of Sagitto Limited, dedicated to combining the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning with spectroscopy.

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