Infrastructure alliance inflates cloud prospects

The Open Data Centre Alliance (ODCA) has issued a slew of announcements in support of its prediction that cloud deployment numbers will triple in the next two years. 

Based on predictions from its networking, storage and enterprise management members’ cloud deployments, it also said their cloud operations adoption would be five times faster than broad market forecasts.

It compared its adoption rate to that of analyst IDC, which predicted in the second quarter this year the global market for public cloud IT services would surpass $90 billion (£56 billion) by 2015.

“A tripling of cloud operations is five times faster than our most current forecasts of broad cloud services growth,” stated Matthew Eastwood, group vice president and general manager of IDC's Enterprise Platform Group.

“The organisation has produced a unique opportunity for accelerated, customer prioritised innovation, which is reflected in this aggressive forecast of cloud adoption.”

The ODCA also announced the addition of HP and Computer Associates (CA) to its member ranks, which no doubt helped tint its rosy outlook. The organisation said it could now count representation from over 90 per cent of the virtualisation software market and over two-thirds of the server hardware market among its members.

Over 40 per cent of ODCA members were expecting to run more than 40 per cent of their internal IT in cloud environments in the next two years. More than 30 per cent said human resources (HR), along with legal and finance applications, were primary targets for enterprise cloud adoption, while sales and marketing tools were cited as top targets for public cloud implementation.

Marvin Wheeler, ODCA Board of Directors chairman, said the forecasts illustrated how rapidly its membership was “implementing cloud in internal environments and with service providers”.

The notices are the latest details to emerge from the ODCA as it moves towards its declared goal of encouraging over $50billion in cloud investment over the next three years.

The ODCA also said it would align its cloud security assurance and monitoring usage models with the cloud audit specification and security, trust and registry (STAR) programme of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) to establish a standard definition of security for cloud services in the first half of next year.

Collaboration with the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) will focus on enhancements of the DMTF's open virtualisation format (OVF) specification to support the ODCA's virtual machine (VM) interoperability usage model. Results from this joint work are expected to simply cloud workload migration, regardless of VM manager or data centre location before the second half of next year.

The organisation also released its first industry best practice paper for cloud application development and resiliency to tackle availability concerns in the face of recent outages. The paper addresses the top challenges identified by ODCA members as application migration, secure federation and simplified management.

Clive Longbottom, founder and business process facilitation service director of analyst Quocirca, told Cloud Pro he welcomed the move towards convergence of some of these cloud industry groups.

But he added: “As they say, the wonderful thing about (cloud) standards is that there are so many to choose from.”

He commended the ODCA for bringing together an impressive list of members, but pointed out many also sit on a large number of cloud bodies, not all of which seem to want to work together.

“There are still too many different bodies covering different cloud technologies and approaches that make it difficult for end users to figure out who’s doing what,” he said.

“For example, is OpenStack a product, an approach or a group? Why does SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) have a cloud group within it? The DTMF, IEE, W3C, OASIS all have different cloud groups, many working on standards.”

As to the ODCA collaborations, Longbottom concluded: “I hope that it all works out, but they will need to move fast to stop the existing fragmentation of cloud, based on proprietary platforms (such as Amazon, Azure and so on) and take a more long-term approach, where workloads can be moved across cloud providers in an open, self-service, flexible and elastic manner (which is pretty much what NIST’s definition of cloud is).”