The coalition of end users, dubbed the
Membership consists of more than 70 businesses with approximately $50 billion in annual IT investments, with members such as China Life, Shell, Lockheed Martin and J.P. Morgan Chase. Each corporation involved already has some form of cloud development, and the alliance would involve companies sharing their cloud data needs without preference to vendors, according to an Intel news release.
“The industry has an opportunity to accelerate the potential of cloud computing, delivering even better industry economics through this transformation,” said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager, Intel Data Center Group, in a news release. “With the Open Data Center Alliance we now have the world’s top businesses focused and actively engaged with Intel and the high-tech industry, accelerating solutions to the cloud’s key challenges,” Skaugen said.
In a statement on the group website, Mario Muller, vice president of IT infrastructure with member group and car manufacturer BMW, said the group would work to create a “vendor-agnostic” roadmap on cloud standards.
“As CIOs and data center managers we want all of the things that the next-generation IT infrastructure promises, yet there are significant challenges in evolving to internal and external clouds, including security, compliance, need for greater levels of efficiency, and simplification of IT infrastructure manageability,” Muller said.
This article originally appeared on Information Management's website. Justin Kern is associate editor at Information Management and can be reached at
