BANGALORE, INDIA: CA Technologies announced the debut of Cloud Commons, a collaborative community and website for IT professionals.

In addition to CA Technologies, which is sponsoring the site, foundational members of the Cloud Commons initiative include TM Forum, Red Hat, Carnegie Mellon University and Insight Investments, which is hosting the site.

“Demand for cloud services holds significant potential for the technology and communications industries, but many barriers still exist to widespread adoption at an enterprise level,” said Martin Creaner, president, TM Forum. “We are fully supportive of this type of initiative to improve the uptake and development of a vibrant and open cloud services market.”

Among the key components of the site will be:
· Service Measurement Index (SMI), being developed by Carnegie Mellon University, a standard for quantifying and evaluating services, addressing the need for industry-wide, globally accepted measures for calculating the benefits and risks of cloud computing services.

· A marketplace of cloud computing service offerings. This marketplace is expected to include vendor service ratings to enable participants to compare alternate service options. 

· An area that will allow participants to provide qualitative feedback on their experience with third-party cloud services.

· Features that will encourage peer collaboration and networking, permitting community commentary on content posted on the site and enable the sharing of cloud best practices.

· Articles from industry analysts and subject matter experts, blog feeds from industry thought leaders, white papers and stories on real experiences from IT professionals.

CA Technologies invested in initial independent research to provide starting-point information about the many cloud services. On-going community participation will be able to build on and expand this information, while also adding commentary and entirely new content.