Monday. I follow up an Open Source Business Foundation (OSBF) invitation. Topic: Formation of the Open Cloud Business Initiative (OCBI). Fine, again another initiative dealing with the cloud, crossed my mind. In the invitation 6 basic principles were mentioned – expressions like ‘Open Cloud’. ‘Openness’, ‘standard’ and ‘community’ could be found – not really surprising taking the organizer into account.
Prior to the press conference I surfed on the OSBF pages. In the German news section an article with the headline caught my eye: „Open Cloud Initiative restarted“. The article continues with „end of July 2011, at OSCON 2011, the „Open Cloud Initiative“ (OCI) got introduced to the public. It is the 2nd attempt, but this time the circumstances are better.“ I see! So, how many attempts might need this OCBI? With this in mind, I’m on my way to attend the press conference. The event does open with anything surprising: The cloud stood at the beginning of its product life cycle and was still growing, and now the lessons learned of the open source era should flow in. So far so good. Then the talk caught my interest at a point when it was explicitly mentioned that the initiative does not insist on open source code and acknowledges IP rights. In my humble opinion, compared to other open source initiatives, this fine distinction is significant as it is like opening the door to commercial vendors such as Salesforce.com. These companies do not only talk about open standards as well as data sovereignty etc., but also walk the talk more and more. The Database.com Data Residency Option (DRO) for example, announced by Salesforce and slated for 2012, is definitely a first step which could build a basis for dialogue – assuming both parties are willing. Whether and when corporate users would fully operate in a public cloud was the other interesting discussion point to me. Even though the point in time might be far-out – from each ones point of view – all founding members agree that a public cloud is the ultimate goal. An OCBI’s basic principles are supposed to be realized in the very same public cloud. In the end, this would mean that one day all services would be not only entirely open accessible but also compatible and interoperable. No lock-in would exist for corporate users, as well as costs for a change of supplier would be increasingly negligible. Thus, besides factors such as partner network and service, the offerings of the providers would truly differ by its price and value, and not by the effort to implement, integrate or replace something. The service’s pure business value as well as, the usability of potentially software, would come to the fore. This is what I hear mantra-like from so many sides since I have started in IT sector – this is now 15 years ago. However, I wish this new initiative that it does not need a second attempt and that many additional companies will see the slightly opened door and follow. Maybe one day I will see that corporate users will choose services ‘just’ because of the business value and for no other reason – I have a dream…
