Interoperable Cloud makes progress

INDIA: Today, the Open Data Center Alliance has announced a major milestone in its mission to drive open, interoperable cloud solutions.  In just seven months, the Alliance has quadrupled membership to more than 280 global IT leaders with collective annual IT spending of over $100 billion, formed workgroups, established alignment with key industry standards bodies and solutions providers and published initial cloud requirements, a press release added.

Today’s announcement marks the Alliance’s release of the first, user-driven requirements for the cloud based on member prioritization of the most pressing challenges facing IT. The release will shape member purchasing and outline requests to vendors and solutions providers to deliver leading cloud and next-generation data center solutions, it states.     

“Delivery of the Open Data Center Alliance’s first Usage Model publications fulfills the promise made by the Alliance to change the game in data center solution development and consumption,” said Matthew Eastwood, group vice president, Enterprise Platform Research at IDC. “The speed at which the organization formed and delivered the initial usage models sends a clear message to the cloud industry on how IT is planning to prioritize its data center and cloud planning along with the organization’s commitment to solve real challenges.”

The first publicly-available documents published by the Open Data Center Alliance include eight Open Data Center Usage Models which define IT requirements for cloud adoption and an Open Data Center Vision for Cloud Computing. These lay out a plan to enable federation, agility and efficiency across cloud computing while identifying the specific innovations in secure federation, automation, common management and policy and solution transparency required for widespread adoption of cloud services. Through adoption, these innovations aim to reduce $25 billion in annual IT costs within five years and unleash over $50 billion in cloud services innovation.

“This publication exceeds our expectations for a first statement of customer requirements for cloud and reflects the importance of this topic to our collective 280+ strong global membership. The organization’s ability to very rapidly come together, establish workgroups, and develop the initial usage models demonstrates what is possible when end users share a common vision for the requirements of shaping evolving data centers and cloud computing,” said Curt Aubley, vice president and CTO of Cyber Security & NexGen Innovation, Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Solutions, and Open Data Center Alliance president. “The Alliance enthusiastically endorses use of the usage models for immediate use for member planning for cloud implementations and encourages the vendor and solution provider community to leverage these use case driven guidelines when developing products.”

The Alliance is collaborating with an ecosystem of standards bodies and vendors to turn these requirements into industry-backed, implementable solutions.