Last year in a flurry of blog posts, there were several folks pushing to start work on a cloud computing standard. At the time I responded that I thought it was too early, because the realm of possibilities needed to be explored further. Plus, IMHO the best standards don’t document what is, but provide a framework for future work.

Well I’m happy to say that I think the time has come when we have enough companies in the space working on creative products and services that a standard can progress productively. We’ve begun to share our vision for what that standard can achieve, it’s called Cloudware, and covers not only AppLogic but a whole new way to approach infrastructure.

Over the next couple months I’ll be reaching out to companies that may be interested in participating in a standards effort as well as looking into what the right venue is for the work. I’ve worked on a few standards in my career (SCSI, QIC, 1000BASE-X, 10GBASE-X, Infiniband) and have found that truly open bodies that foster broad participation create the best standards, though they require the most work. For this effort I’d love to see not only the folks who label themselves cloud computing today, but also data center operators, networking vendors, server vendors, ISVs and folks like APC who deal in power infrastructure. If you’re interested, please email and I’ll keep you up to date.