Microsoft Joins Open Data Center Alliance

Microsoft has joined the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) as a contributor member, the organization announced in Mar. 2013. The ODCA is an independent organization whose mission is to bring together leaders from across industries to work together toward a vision of open, industry-standard cloud solutions delivery.

Wide Membership, Cloud Services Focus

The ODCA is led by a 12-member steering committee, which includes major banks, manufacturers, and telcos, and has more than 300 members, mostly users of data center and cloud services. Enterprises, vendors, or any organization using large-scale data centers might be interested in joining either as solution providers, which can help them ensure that their cloud services interoperate with others’, or (like Microsoft) as contributors, which allows them to see drafts of the organization’s publications and contribute to technical committees. The publications include a series of Master Usage Models, which define standard terminology covering cloud services, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), service orchestration, secure federation, workload migration, and interoperability across clouds provided by different vendors. There is also a tool to help write requests for proposals, which could help with procurement of cloud services. For Microsoft, membership in the ODCA will allow the company to provide input to the ODCA’s activities and publications using its experience with Azure and cloud services, while also connecting with users of the Azure cloud platform and services since many ODCA members are large Microsoft customers.