By Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Microsoft Federal
My last post focused on cloud standards in support of interoperability, and how the best existing Web standards have incredible value as we think about defining cloud standards. Jean Paoli, Microsoft’s General Manager of Interop and XML Architecture, recently tackled this same topic at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), and I wanted to call attention to some of his key points because I believe they are essential considerations as we approach cloud standards in the federal government.
First, Jean isn’t just an interoperability expert, he’s the co-founder of the XML 1.0 standard, one of the most pervasive Web standards in the world today. He clearly has a deep understanding of the standards that enable innovation and promote progress. Jean’s main point on cloud is that it’s fundamentally about connectivity, and you can’t achieve that without solutions that speak the same language. In his blog post on this topic, he identified four basic elements of achieving an “Open Cloud”:
To achieve these goals we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Existing Web standards like Representational State Transfer (REST) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) can serve as the foundation for open cloud platforms. There are some gaps that need to be filled as we think about comprehensive standards, and organizations like the Distributed Management Taskforce (DMTF) are facilitating these important discussions, but we in industry can’t wait to innovate. In a recent GCN article on Jean’s speech, James Staten of Forrester research said that “standards always lag innovation” – and it’s true. History shows that standards emerge when they are needed, and industry must continue to create the best open platforms for organizations to choose from when broad cloud standards gain acceptance.