Right up there with security concerns, vendor lock-in has for a long time been cited as one of the major problems faced by companies looking into cloud migration and adoption. Not only that, but switching vendors and migrating any signficant amount of data can be time consuming and hideously expensive.

Now, though, a small upstart that goes by the name of CliQr is attempting to change all that.

Stealing a march on Google just one day before it launches its I/O conference in San Francisco, the Californian startup has unveiled its new cloud application management platform CloudCenter, which is designed to enable the deployment and management of a variety of cloud-based applications on any type of cloud model – public, private or hybrid – without any disruption or expense hrough migration.

Speaking in an interview last Monday, CliQr CEO and founder Gaurav Manglik explained the simplicity of CloudCenter. Native applications can be easily uploaded to CloudCenter, then the said apps can be benchmarked against the likes of Amazon Cloud Services. Once there, users can select the new cloud they want to use, and the apps will automatically run on the new cloud service. CliQr can not only migrate the aps, but also run them on others without any lock-in.

According to Manglik, CloudCenter is a “potential one-click” switch from one cloud platform to another.

David Cope, chief marketing officer of CliQr, insisted that there was nothing intricate about CloudCenter:

“In some ways it seems magical, but it’s really not,” he insisted.

CloudCenter has the potential to benefit a veriety of workloads and industries, explained Cope. Compute-intensive applications, such as sourcing medical researc from a variety of healthcare organzations, or webites that are highly variable, such as online helpdesks and eCommerce sites, are obvious examples.

To give an idea of just how much time can be saved through using CliQr to migrate apps to another cloud, Manglik explained that some of its existing customers have already migrated legacy workloads to the cloud in just 24 hours – a pretty damn good improvement on the typical six month time frame such an operation would take using other competitors solutions.

CliQr can already boast a number of high profile customers. RefleXion Medical, a provider of medical equipment, has already deployed CloudCenter on Rackspace and Amazon clouds, doing so within a single day and cutting the applications’ running time from four weeks on in-house hardware to less than 24 hours.