Diaz: What’s in store for open standards

What does the buzz around open standards like OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform, mean for agencies in practice? Angel Diaz, IBM’s vice president of open standards, offered three key indicators for 2014.

New ecosystems: “The power of open standards and innovation is not just having a single vendor or organization or open-source effort thinking of a problem. It’s also about the ecosystem of folks enabled to connect into these things,” Diaz said. “I think you’ll start to see ecosystems expanding, and not just at the technology layers.”

Flexibility in hybrid environments: As agencies shift from small-scale applications in the cloud to more mission-critical operations, hybrid clouds – a combination of public and private clouds – are likely to grow more common. Enter open standards, which Diaz said “allow greater flexibility” than proprietary solutions.

Cloud Foundry, the next big thing? Diaz predicts Cloud Foundry will be to application deployment in the cloud what OpenStack is for open-source cloud computing platforms. An open platform where users can build, test, deploy and scale applications in the cloud, Cloud Foundry has already developed a sizeable following. “A year from now, Cloud Foundry will be as big or bigger than OpenStack because there’s a much wider audience,” Diaz said. With so many potential applications looking to test the waters of cloud computing, Diaz said Cloud Foundry is sure to receive continued attention, including the government’s. “Open platforms are going to continue to grow in 2014,” Diaz said.