ODCA and DMTF: Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together?

[WP_IMAGE]A fledgling customer cloud standards advocacy group and a long-established vendor group “announced a collaboration that will hasten the development of industry standards for managing cloud computing environments.”I was very hot on the idea of a powerful collection of cloud consuming companies coming together in the form of the ODCA (Open Data Center Alliance). When the ODCA released a set of usage models I was especially heartened. Customers need a strong voice with which to speak in the fast developing world of virtualized data center operations. Thus, the news earlier this month that the vendor dominated DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) was formally collaborating with the ODCA, didn’t immediately fill me with good thoughts. Keep in mind that I’ve had a years-long relationship with the DMTF and have a great deal of admiration for the groups work including CIM, OVF and SMASH.After speaking with Winston Bumpus, DMTF President, I was assuaged, but still not entirely at ease. The reason for my slight discomfort is the fact that the ODCA has so quickly taken up with a vendor group without first proving that it could make win even a single demand that forced vendors to give ground.To paraphrase Bumpus, this quick collaborative effort between customers and vendors will speed up work that makes the ODCA usage models a reality. That makes sense and I hope that the energy and spirit that brought together the ODCA punches through the languorous pace that sometimes marks that DMTF’s efforts.