Open Cloud standards are essential, says IBM

It's a theme close to the IBM boss' heart as he heads to Brussels to participate in a European Commission conference on open standards.  “The EU has rightly decided that investment in open standards is a good thing to do in order to reduce costs longer term and increase the transparency of government,” he says. 

 

This is a well-timed move, he suggests. “The main role that governments can take is to encourage participation and standardisation,” he notes. “If the EU doesn't get going, well, time matters here. We tend to believe that we should all work through the international standards organisations. As long as we all do that then things are going to be fine. When there's a plethora of standards and you go one way and I go another, then we have problems. Assuming that we have one standard, then multiple implementations are OK. If we have multiple standards and multiple implementations then we have chaos.”

 

There have been noises out of Brussels that suggest that some degree of anti-American rhetoric might slip in if not kept in check. This seems baffling to Karasick.  “I don't understand what it means to have an EU Cloud or a US Cloud,” he explains. “It's about making services available at an appropriate level. We don't want to depend on proprietary implementations of infrastructure. The statement that we need a European Cloud would – I hope – mean that we need a multi-vendor Cloud with interoperability. 

 

It's all a matter of timing, he suggests, with that timing becoming harder to judge.  “More and more people are starting to look at this now so it's out there and evolving,” he says. “One reason to tackle this now is so that there aren't any 800 pound gorillas. The value of having open standards is to force the 800 pound incumbents to open up and not act anti-competitively. That's a message that resonates across Europe. 

 

“It's always about staging really. If you ask anyone about projects, everyone has long term goals or ambitions. It can be about toilet rolls or green energy. There are long term goals and short term needs. You have to deal with the short term needs while not losing the long term. The challenge for any government is to be transparent enough so that the populace understands the journey.  That's hard, it's a challenge.”

 

So should government be embarking on ambitious all-encompassing proposals such as the G-Cloud?  “It's not so much important that there is a G-Cloud, but that there should be federation of Clouds,” suggests Karasick. “The thing you use to manage scale is standards so you force through standards interoperability so that one Cloud service works with another.  President Obama is not talking so much about the Cloud as about openness, citizen-based services and egovernment.”

 

 

All that being said, what's IBM's role in this standards-based Cloud future.? “My team does a lot of work on open standards.,” explains Karasick. “We need to get some uniformity of view – what is a hybrid Cloud, what is a private Cloud, what do we mean by Cloud management and so on. The pearls of wisdom are the standards. Eyes are much more wide open than they have been in the past. We have to get this right when we talk about standards that are built on top of the Cloud.”

 

“We outsource and run Clouds all over the world so IBM Global Technology Services is pretty active there. Of course there is a difference between outsourcing and running private Clouds. Will there be a services giant in the Cloud? If there is  a gorilla it's not gong to look like it will in the past. Something disruptive will happen, but I've no idea what that will be. 

 

But the problem with standards bodies in the past has been that while there is a first flush of enthusiasm and idealism, as soon as workable standards are out there and can be productised, then all notions of idealism go out the window and former allies start to fight like a bag of cats. It happened with Unix, it happened with object oriented technologies, why won't it happen this time?

 

“You know it's going to be all right if we fight like cats,” reckons Karasick. “I don't believe that that infrastructure providers of tomorrow will really be a surprise. The question really is who knows how to build out the software and services. It's the business model and the stuff on top that is where the value is.  One of the reasons that the Cloud is a growth area for us as IBM and as a software and services business is that we will be under a lot of the Clouds that are built.”

 

But it's not really a technology debate at the moment. “People are leaning not so much to the technology side, but the business side,” says Karasick. “Cloud is not so about which provisioning technology wins out, it's about do we understand the business models that get built,” he insists, although he can't help but fly the IBM flag when he adds: “On the provisioning side, we will win. We are trying very hard. One of the 2 or 3 platforms at the high end will be IBM.”

 

Overall, it's an interesting time for standards and government's role in Cloud Computing – and at a time of international economic stringency. “I have a new respect for civil servants. It's tough to be working for any government right now with the way the economy is,” concludes Karasick. “ I went to a conference on social networking in egovernment. The CIO of New York City was there and talking about their 311 public Cloud-based information service. That's a good example of civil servants working to think about interesting ways to make their services available to the public.”