Cloud Standards

So I got a chance to host a session in MR's Cloud Summit at the Computer History Museum yesterday on Cloud Standards.  I began by asserting that a lot of innovation/standardization activity goes through the following three phases:

Fundamentally, for first 5 years, rapid innovation does not need standards and standards might inhibit the adoption.  In the next phase, there is a distinct fear of lockin, which sometimes leads to standards, sometimes interoperability leads to standards, but eventually, the industry consolidates in this phase and standards typically emerge (such as SQL).  In the next phase, there is another period of growth, but vendors find new ways to create lockins (e.g., stored procedure languages in the database world).

So the question is, what about cloud.  My hypothesis in the pitch was the following

That different layers of the cloud infrastructure are in different phases.  The bottom is more amenable to standards (such as OVF), than one version of the middle tier is -- the version that is pushing for a new "stack" (such as force.com, Google app engine, Amazon S3 etc.).  However, another version of the middle-tier, which is taking traditional 3-tier apps and moving them to the cloud is already well past the standards phase, because these applications have made their decisions on Oracles, DB2's, WebSpheres and BEA's. 

It was  lively discussion and I will need to refine my hypothesis and theory, but I would welcome comments.

And more on what I saw and heard at the summit later.

Comments

[Carlos Gondo]

Anant, just a little point: the link is http://www.gogoinflight.com ok? the pointer on your blog is not poiting correctly, ok? Thank's! Carlos