Major Standards Development Organizations Collaborate to Further Adoption of Cloud Standards
Cross Institutional Group Pursuing Clarity of Standards Landscape

Arlington, VA. - July 13, 2009 - At its Cloud Standards Summit here this week, OMG™ today announced a collaboration with leading technology Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) to coordinate and communicate standards for Cloud computing and storage. Organizations expected to participate in this round-table style collaboration include: the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the Open Grid Forum (OGF), the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA).

To support this collaboration a public working group has being established and anyone with relevant technical skills, interest and commitment can participate. Participation by enterprise and government IT leaders is encouraged to ensure that their critical standards needs are being addressed. The work is an outgrowth of the already existing Standards Development Organization Collaboration on Networked Resources Management (SCRM) working group that has coordinated management standards in general.

"OMG is committed to providing modeling-based solutions for complex business challenges, including those associated with cloud computing. Cloud computing, which is primarily a business decision of operating expense vs. capital expense, fits well into our vision of Business Ecology, which is focused on the optimization of business processes through standards," said Richard Mark Soley, Ph.D., chairman and CEO, OMG.

Most SDOs already have many one-to-one liaison relationships, which are effective and productive for handling specific issues. This round table-style collaboration provides a "bird's eye view" of this broad and complicated technical area, helping further the work already underway between these leading standards bodies. This is the main reason the Cloud Standards Coordination working group was born. The group has a goal to create a landscape of cloud standards work, including common terminology.

The organizations involved have created a wiki to describe each organization's standards and efforts in this space. Each SDO has representatives that keep the wiki up to date. The URL is http://cloud-standards.org.

"Cloud-standards.org is a vital mechanism for coordination across the cloud computing landscape. OGF will use this venue to drive progress for end-users, developers, vendors, and all cloud stakeholders," said Dr. Craig A. Lee, President, Open Grid Forum.

"The DMTF has established relationships with many SDOs through its alliance partner program and is actively expanding those alliances to leverage existing and future DMTF standards, such as OVF," said Winston Bumpus, President DMTF. "With the recent formation of the DMTF Open Cloud Standards Incubator the coordination of DMTF standards with these SDOs and industry groups will be key to minimizing overlap and identifying any gaps between the standards."

"The SNIA, in its role to advance storage and information technology, is defining a cloud storage taxonomy, a cloud reference model and the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) specification in coordination with and support of several standards development organizations and industry groups," said Vincent Franceschini, Vice Chair SNIA Board of Directors and Co-chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage committee. "We see our cloud storage standards coordination work as key to achieving integration and adoption of these new industry cloud standards in released products and services as well as complementing existing storage and computer standards."

"With this collaboration, we look forward to leveraging OCC's work developing standards for large data clouds and for inter-cloud communication with other standards efforts," says Robert Grossman, Chair of the Open Cloud Consortium.

"Fostering trust in cloud computing services is a key criteria for enabling its growth," said Jim Reavis, co-founder of the Cloud Security Alliance. "CSA seeks to encourage pervasive adoption of best practices for securing cloud computing to create a trusted baseline for the industry and are proud to be a part of this collaborative effort to help us achieve that mission."

###

About OMG
OMG is an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry consortium that in 2009 is celebrating its 20th Anniversary. OMG Task Forces develop enterprise integration standards for a wide range of technologies, including: Real-time, Embedded and Specialized Systems, Analysis & Design, Architecture-Driven Modernization and Middleware and an even wider range of industries, including: Business Modeling and Integration, C4I, Finance, Government, Green Computing, Healthcare, Insurance, Legal Compliance, Life Sciences Research, Manufacturing Technology, Robotics, Software-Based Communications 
and Space.

OMG’s modeling standards, including the Unified Modeling Language™ (UML®) and Model Driven Architecture® (MDA®), enable powerful visual design, execution and maintenance of software and other processes, including IT Systems Modeling and Business Process Management. OMG’s middleware standards and profiles are based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA®) and support a wide variety of industries.

More information about OMG can be found at www.omg.org.  OMG is headquartered in Needham, MA, USA.

Note to editors: MDA, Model Driven Architecture, OMG Logo, XMI, UML, UML logo and CORBA are registered trademarks, and OMG, Object Management Group, Business Ecology, Actionable Architecture, SOA Consortium, SysML, SoaML, MOF, MDA Logos, BPMN, OCRES, OCUP, OCEB, Green Computing Maturity Model, GCMM, Unified Modeling Language and "We Set the Standard" tagline are trademarks of Object Management Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Edited by Stephanie