Open Data Center Alliance. The “Cloud” Does not Mean Interoperability

Authors: Dan Shey, Practice Director, Mobile Services
Subha Rama, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Communications and Mobility

Published: 29 Oct 2010

Recently several companies, including worldwide giants Shell, BMW, China Life, Deutsche Bank and Marriot, have formed the Open Data Center Alliance. Ultimately the alliance’s goal is to drive standards development and ease connectivity to hosted data and services wherever they reside. Unfortunately, despite all the activity around the cloud – which now has big stakeholders such as Google, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco and others – there has been little done to make these clouds interoperable. From the cloud vendor perspective, ensuring interoperability offers little financial incentive. However, for the cloud end user, lack of interoperability would mean vendor tie-in and high switching costs. Currently, the data and systems in one vendor’s cloud do not “talk” to another cloud provider’s platform. To put this in perspective, end users want the data center scenario, where best-of-breed systems are integrated to communicate seamlessly with each other, to be extended to disparate vendor clouds. Now, that is by no means an easy task. The alliance wants to fix this problem. Are their interoperability goals achievable?

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