A consortium of companies announced the formation of OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) Technical Committee, an open standards initiative to enhance the portability of cloud applications and services.

Members of the consortium include 3M, ASG Software, CA Technologies, Capgemini, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, Gale Technologies, IBM, Jericho Systems, Morphlabs, Red Hat, SAP, Software AG, TELUS (News - Alert), and others.

The OASIS consortium will work toward developing an interoperability standard that will make it easier to deploy cloud applications without vendor lock-in, while maintaining application requirements for security, governance, and compliance. It will create highly flexible IT environments that can quickly respond to changing business priorities.

“TOSCA's aim is to enable broad cloud portability by providing an open standard to describe a complex application running on a complex environment,” said Mary Johnston Turner, IDC research vice president, Enterprise Systems Management (News - Alert) Software, in a statement. “This is a critical missing link for customers that want to take full advantage of hybrid cloud architectures and the full range of available cloud services.”

The consortium will enable the interoperable description of application and infrastructure cloud services, the relationships between parts of the service, and the operational behavior of these services (e.g., deploy, patch, shutdown) – independent of the supplier creating the service, and any particular cloud provider or hosting technology, a press release from the consortium said. It will also make it possible for higher-level operational behavior to be associated with cloud infrastructure management.

“By improving service and application portability in a vendor-neutral ecosystem, TOSCA will streamline the migration of existing applications to the cloud as well as cloud-bursting,” said Paul Lipton of CA Technologies (News - Alert), co-chair of the OASIS TOSCA Technical Committee, in a statement. “It could also facilitate the evolution towards more dynamic, multi-cloud provider applications.”

As the first step toward creating interoperability, an initial draft specification for TOSCA was jointly authored by member companies including Capgemini, CA Technologies, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, IBM (News - Alert), NetApp, PwC, Red Hat, SAP AG, Software AG, Virtunomic, and WSO2. This specification will be contributed to the OASIS TOSCA Technical Committee for further development and advancement within the open standards process.

“Similar to the advent of the World Wide Web, cloud computing is creating new possibilities and enabling more efficient, flexible, open and collaborative computing models,” said Laurent Liscia, executive director, OASIS. “Having open standards around cloud will help achieve an IT environment with fewer boundaries, increase the speed of adoption and add a new level of flexibility. The beneficiaries of TOSCA will be consumers, developers and providers of cloud-based solutions.”

Recently IDC (News - Alert) stated that spending on mobile computing, cloud services, social networking, and big data analytics technologies is growing at about 18 percent per year and is expected to account for at least 80 percent of IT spending growth between now and 2020. The research agency predicted 2012 will be the year of cloud computing.

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