Customers flex bargaining muscles

Sometimes you don't have to dress up as a superhero to get what you want. While some are scaling London's most famous landmarks to make their point on paternal access rights, IT buyers are taking a more practical approach to lobbying vendors.

Last week, Sun was hard at work trying to decide exactly how to release its Solaris operating system to open source developers.

The move, unthinkable a couple of years ago, is in part due to pressure from Sun users to keep Solaris a multiplatform operating system. It is only a few years since Sun said it was putting Solaris x86 development on hold. That announcement prompted a furious answer from users, with some going so far as to take out newspaper ads to protest against the move. Today, Sun's commitment to x86 is stronger than ever and the company spends as much time pushing AMD Opteron as it does its own Sparc processor. Clearly a victory for user power.

The enterprise IT wheel of fortune is still in spin, forcing software vendors to cede more control of the market than they might like. Once it was a disposal ground for moribund products, but open source is becoming home to datacentre platforms such as Solaris as well as some of the most promising products in development, such as BEA's Beehive middleware. Users and developers voting with their feet have made the biggest names in IT follow their well-trodden path.

Sun is also to be commended for conducting an open dialogue with the IT community. Unlike many platitudinous "message from the CEO" missives, president and chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz's blog is a must-read.

Meanwhile, international IT bosses fed up with the duck-and-dive proprietary tactics of competing security software developers have set up their own body. The Jericho Forum will set out an architecture that it insists suppliers must support if they want to get the business of firms such as GlaxoSmithKline, Unilever and Rolls-Royce.

Similarly, the Liberty Alliance, a group that aims to set standards in identity management, has twice appointed a user as chairman.

Even Microsoft - with some sizeable caveats - is getting in on the act. In the US, the Bits financial services consortium succeeded in getting Microsoft to extend support for Windows NT 4.0. Microsoft has also showed a willingness to sweeten deals where Linux has threatened its hegemony.

And despite phasing out Alpha and PA-Risc, HP is not abandoning users. Instead, the roadmap goes on for so long that many administrators will have retired by the time support is terminated.

However, some suppliers don't always agree with the maxim about the customer always being right. In the teeth of repeated dissent from UK blue-chip user group The Corporate IT Forum (TIF), Microsoft shows no signs of extending local NT 4 support.

From customer lock-in to hidden code and hostile purchases, the IT industry doesn't exactly have a great rep for caring and sharing. Today, there are some signs that vendors are listening, though. They have to; IT chiefs aren't about to hang off a ledge at Buckingham Palace, but they are more than willing to consider hopping onto a different platform.