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At the top of the year, US Cloud services company, Appirio gave out its potted forecast for what will be happening in Cloud-land in 2010. It raised some interesting questions, with perhaps the most important being implied within its suggestion that Cloud standardisation won’t – and indeed shouldn’t – happen during the coming year. This is because there is just too much innovation going on in Cloud-land for any but the lowest-level standards to stick.

This is the age-old paradox that IT has thrown up over and over again, in many different areas – which is needed most, standardisation or innovation? In nearly every case, the industry has voted for innovation, and howled loudly every time it is seen to be `stifled’.

Yet if you look at the results of innovation, the vast majority of it fades away, unnoticed and unremembered, to die a sad and lonely death somewhere few can find. Look at the results of standardisation on the other hand and that is where you will find the big successes. Let’s face it, the majority the servers running Cloud services in most of the world’s datacentres are, at heart, still fundamentally PCs running a processor architecture – Intel’s x86 - that first saw the light of day back in 1985. That’s called `development’ not innovation. There has been lots of innovation aimed at rivalling Intel’s success over the years, but nearly all of it has faded and died.

Why does this happen? Because standardisation allows a technology to be developed so that it really can start to meet the needs of a marketplace – steam trains became useful when four feet eight and a half inches became accepted as the standard track gauge. It made it easier and cheaper to make and lay track, which allowed travellers to travel and freight to move – and that was the marketplace, not innovations in valve gear and boiler design.

The marketplace – what users actually require - is the most important element now for Cloud services development. Yet the industry is, as always, more keen on doing `cool’ new things with technology. Let’s build a Ferrari-engined horsebox…it be great fun for the driver. Maybe so, but does anyone ask the horse what it thinks about it? – that’s the marketplace.

As side issue, it could be suggested that Appirio actually works contrary to its predictions, in that it builds enterprise solutions on Cloud platforms such as Saleforce.com, Google Apps and Amazon Web Services’. In other words, it is built on standardized platforms – they’re most certainly in a state of on-going development, but innovation?

The Cloud has done well to become as accepted as it is in the enterprise marketplace – not least because the fundamental concepts underpinning it make reasonably obvious sense to both technical staff and business managers. But if it is to really become accepted as the de facto approach to building information infrastructures for business, then a reasonable degree of standardisation is going to be essential.

Two obvious areas that demonstrate this occur to me. One is governance and compliance issues: if the Cloud is really going to play a ubiquitous role in the enterprise then it must be able to function in standard ways to match standard – and often legal – processes. That must also be the default. It may be boring and tedious, but it can stop people going to jail and businesses from imploding because they `innovated’.

The other is the removal of the vendor or service provider lock-in. If your data is held by one service provider you can usually get to it – even have it delivered regularly. But if your business is held by one service provider and uses their proprietary business processes? You are locked in. What if that service provider fails? Without some standardised way of inter-service communication and porting – a standard intermediate `language’ perhaps – then your business could go down with the service provider.

Until such issues are solved, many Cloud-based solutions may never reach the level of no-brainer for business managers. Boring as it may be, standards will have to win out over innovation in the long run, so why not make a start on it this year.