The Open Data Center Alliance 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.
The 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.
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.