Cloud Standards Customer Council

At the Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC) meeting on June 21 in Salt Lake City, UT, several cloud standards development organizations (SDOs) including Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), OASIS, Open Grid Forum (OGF), OMG, Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), and The Open Group presented overviews of their cloud standards work to members.

TM Forum will be giving their cloud standards presentation to the members at the next virtual meeting to be held on July 20. CSCC also announced that Andrew Watson, vice president, OMG, has been appointed as CSCC Liaison Officer to the SDOs. The SDOs have been invited to work with CSCC to help drive customer requirements and priorities for cloud computing into their standards development processes. The broad recognition and support of CSCC by standards organizations [see quote sheet] makes it possible to focus the important efforts of those organizations on requirements and priorities of cloud computing customer organizations.

"As we’ve stated from the beginning, CSCC is not a standards organization. CSCC recognizes the critical importance of the work these standards organizations do in the cloud computing space," said Melvin Greer, Senior Fellow and Chief Strategist, Cloud Computing, Lockheed Martin; chair, CSCC steering committee. "CSCC will be developing requirements for both horizontal and vertical-market cloud deployments which it will share with standards organizations."

"OMG has a deep respect for those individuals and organizations that are ‘in the trenches’ moving to public and private cloud infrastructure, and realize the importance of their work. We need the input from those cloud veterans that are building real systems," said Andrew Watson, vice president and technical director, OMG, and CSCC standards liaison officer. "OMG has a 22-year commitment to developing standards that build markets and we want to get it right for cloud users."

The appointment of a Liaison Officer will help to streamline the process of sharing customer requirements into the standards development processes of these standards organizations as well as others the CSCC hopes to work with in the future, and help to prevent duplication of efforts.

CA Technologies, IBM, Kaavo, Rackspace and Software AG are founding sponsors  of Cloud Standards Customer Council. The CSCC is managed by OMG.

Membership in the CSCC is free for qualified end-user organizations.