Whenever I speak with clients about their IT strategy, vendor lock-in seems to be a very urgent and important topic. Especially regulated organizations like banks and insurance companies try to avoid lock-in at all costs. This short article explores this topic and offers some suggestions for dealing with it. Vendor lock-in First, we need to define what we mean by “locking into a vendor”. Locking into a vendor usually means, that our systems depend strongly on a vendor’s capability.