I wrote recently about the public sector (US Federal Government) in playing a leadership role in cloud computing. The private sector is also making moves, as James Urquhar wrote in IBM, Microsoft, others align on open clouds.
James noted that representatives of Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF), CloudCamp, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and the IEEE-ISTO met. They agreed on a shared goal to promote use and awareness of open and interoperable cloud computing. They also discussed the ability to enable participants to be able to contribute and use results of broad community collaboration. There was also discussion of the possibility of a trade association or marketing association for cloud computing, but no actions were agreed upon at that time.
These kinds of activities typical for a technology that is still developing. I agree with the hope James expressed for open cloud standards operating in a cooperative, rather than competitive, fashion. I hope vendors are able to move forward with some vision around shared interests for Public clouds, while at the same time we see companies employing more specialized and secure "Private Clouds" and other hybrids such as the "Personal Cloud" we recently talked about, for specific software lifecycle purposes.
The release of an Open Cloud Manifesto, originally authored by IBM, was not without some disagreement, as Microsoft objected, and there were plenty of differing opinions thrown around the blogs I read after this announcement. The group's site shows that many players have signed up but, as James notes in another post, the "big four" of cloud computing, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com, are not signatories so far. You can find the Open Cloud Manifesto at opencloudmanifesto.org.
It notes five challenges to adoption: security, data and application interoperability, data and application portability, governance and maintenance, and metering and monitoring. Several of the challenges this collective is concerned with, are also factors that in our experience, customers are very concerned with; especially the quality and validation aspects of governance, and the portability of Cloud services through virtualization of software components hosted in the cloud to eliminate some dependencies and per-use costs.
The manifesto concludes that it is meant to "begin the conversation, not define it." Obviously these kinds of industry groups are promoted merely as representatives of common interests, and not legal entities. However, we look forward to the rest of the story as the cloud coalesces.
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