Open Data Center Alliance Membership Forecasts a Tripling of Cloud Computing Deployments

–Forecasted growth in member adoption of cloud operations represents 5X faster than broad market forecasts for the >$90B cloud computing market based on the industry’s alignment to deliver open, interoperable cloud solutions.

Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) members will triple cloud deployment in the next 2 years according to a report published by the organization today. This adoption is 5X faster than Q2’2011 IDC market forecasts(1) for the >$90B expected invested in cloud operations worldwide in the next two years and reflects growing member confidence in delivery of industry standard cloud solutions that align with top customer requirements outlined by the organization earlier this year.

The member forecast was delivered as the organization’s leadership outlined its next major advancements in addressing the top obstacles to cloud adoption including publication of best practices for cloud application development and resiliency as well as collaborations on potential standards with the leading industry organizations for cloud security and management, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). The announcements are the latest details to emerge from the organization as it moves towards its goal of accelerating over $50B in cloud investment over the next three years.

"The ODCA membership comprises some of the largest adopters of cloud computing across the globe. Today’s news illustrates how rapidly our membership is implementing cloud in internal environments and with service providers," said ODCA Board of Directors Chairperson Marvin Wheeler. "We’re delighted by the rapid progress to set standards for cloud security and management, and collaboration with data center industry leaders to deliver open, interoperable cloud solutions."

Solving Critical Cloud Challenges through Industry Standards and Best Practices

Collaborations with the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) reflect the latest advancements by the organization to ensure industry standard delivery of open cloud solutions and reflect the group’s prioritization of work addressing the top challenges facing broad adoption of cloud computing. Details of the collaborations include:

— Alignment of the ODCA’s Cloud Security Assurance and Monitoring usage models with CSA’s Cloud Audit specification and STAR (Security, Trust, and Registry) program. First standards are expected to be delivered in H1′ 2012 and will drive standard definition of security for cloud services.

— The focus of the DMTF collaboration will center on enhancements of the DMTF’s OVF Specification to align with the ODCA’s VM Interoperability usage model enabling transparent management of virtual machines regardless of virtual machine manager or data center location and is expected to create a simplified path to cloud workload migration. Results from this joint work are expected in H1′ 2012.

To address member and industry concern on cloud service availability in the face of outages, the ODCA also released its first industry best practices paper for cloud application development and resiliency, offering seven best practices for cloud development and recommended paths for ensuring application availability helping organizations protect against unexpected cloud outages.

Strengthening Solution Provider Response to Open Data Center Alliance End User Requirements

The Alliance also announced that industry leaders HP and CA Technologies have joined the organization. The Alliance now represents more than 90% of virtualization software, two thirds of server hardware, and the majority of data center storage, networking and management market leaders. Solution provider members have already begun delivering proof of concepts solutions aligning with Alliance usage models. The POC solutions were delivered by Cisco, Citrix Systems, Dell, EMC, JouleX, Parallels, Red Hat and VMware at the Intel Developer Forum in September.

Accelerating the Adoption of Cloud in the Industry

Reflecting growing confidence in industry standard delivery of cloud solutions, and the impact the ODCA has made in aligning customer requirements with industry solution development, ODCA members will triple cloud operations in the next two years according to the organization’s initial Insight on Cloud Computing Trends.

"A tripling of cloud operations is 5 times faster than our most current forecasts of broad cloud services growth," said Matthew Eastwood, group vice president and general manager of IDC’s Enterprise Platform Group. "By bringing together leading edge cloud adopters and leading providers, and establishing collaborations with key standards bodies, the ODCA has created a central source to address the top challenges enterprises face in adoption of cloud. The organization has produced a unique opportunity for accelerated, customer prioritized innovation, which is reflected in this aggressive forecast of cloud adoption."

Member adoption forecasts were delivered by the Alliance as part of a broader publication of cloud computing trends. Additional insights from the report include:

— Insight on Adoption: Over 90% of ODCA members have completed strategic planning for cloud implementation or are actively developing plans for cloud adoption. Internal enterprise is leading cloud adoption growth, with more than 40% of members are expecting to run >40% of their internal IT in cloud environments in the next 2 years.

— Application Targets: More than 30% of ODCA members described human resources (HR), legal and finance applications as primary targets for enterprise cloud adoption. Sales and marketing tools were cited, making these applications the top targets for public cloud implementation.

— Top Adoption Challenges: ODCA members identified application migration, secure federation and simplified management as the top challenges to broad cloud adoption which reinforces the importance to today’s Alliance announcements of best practice publication and collaboration with CSA and DMTF.

Today’s news builds upon the culmination of the organization’s first year of operation that saw a quadrupling of membership, now representing over $100B in collective IT spend, the integration of leading solutions providers to member ranks, publication of the first customer requirements for cloud and establishment of collaborations with leading standard bodies including the Cloud Security Alliance, DMTF, TM Forum’s Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council, OASIS, and the Open Compute Project.

To learn more about the ODCA, or to become a member, visit www.opendatacenteralliance.org .