Independent IT consortium Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) to partner with IT systems manager Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) to hasten the development of industry standards for managing cloud computing environments.

The collaboration is expected to address the need for simplified cloud management through a single view of all cloud resources and the collaboration brings together the customer voice on cloud computing and the IT management standards organisation.

Initially, the two organisations together will foster transparent management of virtual machines and is expected to create a simplified path to cloud workload migration.

The partenership is also expected to accelerate delivery of industry standard-based deployments by matching specific customer requirements with targeted specification delivery.

Initial collaboration is focused on enhancements to the DMTF OVF specification and improvements to the DMTF OVF specification will address specific requirements dictated in the ODCA’s VM Interoperability usage model.

DMTF President Winston Bumpus said DMTF believe this collaboration will help define customer requirements in the cloud space and ensure that DMTF’s key standards, such as OVF, are widely accepted throughout the IT industry.

"By combining DMTF’s knowledge in systems management standards with ODCA’s expertise in customer-driven usage models, we have a unique opportunity to ensure that the standards we develop, like our work-in-progress cloud infrastructure management interface (CIMI) specifications, will meet customer needs," said Bumpus.