Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) and the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) announced a collaboration that will hasten the development of industry standards for managing cloud computing environments.

Focusing on interoperability and ease of use, this relationship is expected to address one of the most pressing issues facing widespread computing today - the need for simplified cloud management through a single view of all cloud resources.

Initial collaboration engagement will focus on interoperable management of virtual machines regardless of data center location.

The collaboration brings together a leading customer voice on cloud computing and a leading IT management standards organization. The Open Data Center Alliance, a group of 300+ companies that represent over $100B in annual IT spend, recently published the first customer driven requirements for the cloud with release of its initial usage models. As the global industry organization leading the development, adoption, validation and promotion of interoperable systems management standards, DMTF enables more effective management of millions of IT systems worldwide.

The collaborative work of these organizations will initially foster 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. With virtual machine management estimated to represent 60% of the IT overhead of a physical server, simplified management across enterprise and public cloud implementations represents a major opportunity for increased operational efficiency.

By matching specific customer requirements with targeted specification delivery, the two organizations hope to accelerate delivery of industry standard-based deployments.

Initial collaboration is focused on enhancements to the DMTF OVF specification, which was recently adopted as an international standard by the Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1) of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Improvements to the specification will address specific requirements dictated in the ODCA’s VM Interoperability usage model.

The organizations have also begun investigating industry standard approaches to software licensing within cloud environments, another critical opportunity to accelerate broad cloud application deployments.