OASIS Forms TOSCA Technical Committee to Advance Open Standard for Cloud Portability

[Carol Geyer <carol.geyer@oasis-open.org>]

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OASIS Forms TOSCA Technical Committee to Advance Open Standard for
Cloud Portability

3M, ASG Software, CA Technologies, Capgemini, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, Gale
Technologies, IBM, Jericho Systems, Morphlabs, Red Hat, SAP, Software
AG, TELUS, and Others Collaborate on Standard for Deploying
Interoperable Cloud Applications

16 Jan 2012 – The OASIS international consortium has launched a new
open standards initiative to enhance the portability of cloud
applications and services. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration
Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) Technical Committee will
advance 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.

"IDC's research shows cloud initiatives are top priorities for many
enterprise IT teams," says Mary Johnston Turner, IDC Research Vice
President, Enterprise Systems Management Software. "The goal of these
cloud programs is to reduce costs and improve business agility by
creating highly flexible IT environments that can quickly respond to
changing business priorities. To date, however, most cloud
implementations have been unable to easily migrate applications across
heterogeneous public and private infrastructure resources. TOSCA's aim
is to enable broad cloud portability by providing an open standard to
describe a complex application running on a complex environment. 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."

TOSCA 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. TOSCA 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, co-chair of the OASIS TOSCA Technical Committee.
"It could also facilitate the evolution towards more dynamic,
multi-cloud provider applications."

"TOSCA will be the first standard to describe IT services that go
beyond infrastructure as a service. It will define service templates
across *aaS layers, connecting them to the resource abstraction
layer," added Simon Moser of IBM, who also co-chairs the TOSCA
Committee.

An initial draft specification for TOSCA was jointly authored by
Capgemini, CA Technologies, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, IBM, 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."

Support for TOSCA

ASG
"Freedom of choice is part of ASG DNA. Being able to participate in
the elaboration of the TOSCA standard is for us a fantastic
opportunity to ensure our current and future customers take advantage
of seamless interoperability of Cloud environments." --Pascal Vitoux,
Senior VP, Development

CA Technologies
"With this effort, OASIS is breaking new ground with the first
significant standard focused on the lifecycle of cloud applications
and services across a wide range of infrastructure platforms. TOSCA
shows great potential to facilitate higher levels of cloud application
and service portability without vendor lock-in, which is what our
customers need to achieve the full benefits of cloud computing."
--Adam Famularo, General Manager, Enterprise and Cloud Solutions

Capgemini
"As one of the market leaders in SaaS and cloud computing, Capgemini
is well versed in the chal-lenges of cloud computing. We are delighted
to see the industry coming together to help drive standardisation and
interoperability in the provisioning and management of next generation
envi-ronments."--Steve Jones, Global Head of Master Data Management

Gale Technologies
"Gale Technologies applauds the creation of the TOSCA Technical
Committee and looks forward to working with fellow committee members
to advance the open standards that will facilitate out-of-the-box
interoperability between cloud technologies. We fully expect that
TOSCA will enable complex automation and orchestration between cloud
applications, services, and infrastructure, and will ultimately
accelerate the adoption of cloud technologies, which has been hampered
thus far by the lack of open standards for interoperability." --James
Thomason, CTO

IBM
"This effort is about helping organizations to extend their business
leveraging model-driven Cloud Service Management - using open
standards - to get the greatest benefits from cloud. TOSCA ena-bles
standardized development, deployment and management of Cloud Services
across develop-ment-, test-, acceptance- and production environments
hosted on a single Cloud or multiple Clouds." --Gerd Breiter, IBM
Distinguished Engineer

Morphlabs
"Cloud users today are making large investments migrating their
businesses to the cloud, and, given our history and commitment to
removing barriers to efficient computing, it's exciting for Morphlabs
to contribute expertise to the development of standards that will help
extend our customer's investment into the future." --Lee Thompson, CTO

Red Hat
"Red Hat’s ongoing work in the cloud is focused around providing
powerful open cloud technolo-gies and enabling an ecosystem of
developers, tools, scripts and applications that can interoperate
across public and private clouds. TOSCA’s efforts to contribute to an
open approach for cloud environments align well with our cloud goals,
and we feel this organization will provide benefits for many
enterprises looking to deploy open clouds today." --Scott Crenshaw,
VP, Cloud Business Unit

SAP AG
"As one of the initial co-authors of the TOSCA input specification,
SAP is pleased to see it advance towards industry standardization. SAP
is committed to helping its customers run enterprise software on cloud
infrastructures, and the TOSCA specification will enable customers to
enjoy more cloud choices through easier portability between clouds."
--Claus von Riegen, Program Director, Industry Standards and Open
Source

Software AG
"Software AG has been closely involved at the forefront of leading
industry standards, recognizing the need for interoperable and
portable solutions for our customers. A standard and interoperable way
to describe cloud applications, portable across disparate cloud
providers, is essential for the success of cloud applications of the
next generation and for smoother migration of existing applications to
the cloud. As a co-author and co-submitter of the TOSCA specification
to OASIS, we are happy to see the TC work launched successfully."
--Hans-Christoph Rohland, Senior VP, R&D

TELUS
"With the ongoing propagation of 'Cloud Computing' and expected
ubiquity of this paradigm, a standard mechanism for customers to avoid
vendor lock-in and to be enabled to churn is in their best interest. A
day may come when governments mandate 'Cloud Portability' in a similar
fashion as telephone number portability of decades past. TELUS intends
to take a proactive stance in pre-paring for the projected future mode
of operations in this area." --Shane Logan, Director, Services
Enablement

Additional information:

OASIS TOSCA Technical Committee
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tosca/

TOSCA Draft Specification
http://www.tosca-open.org/

About OASIS:
OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information
Standards) is a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives
the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the
global information society. OASIS promotes industry consensus and
produces worldwide standards for cloud computing, business
transactions, security, privacy, SOA, the Smart Grid, content
technologies, emergency management, and other applications. OASIS open
standards offer the potential to lower cost, stimulate innovation,
grow global markets, and protect the right of free choice of
technology. OASIS members broadly represent the marketplace of public
and private sector technology leaders, users, and influencers. The
consortium has more than 5,000 participants representing over 600
organizations and individual members in 100 countries.
http://www.oasis-open.org