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Open Cloud Manifesto now signed and delivered

Leaked late last week, the Open Cloud Manifesto has been a highly controversial document among cloud industry participants. The document and its signatory list are now officially public.

James Urquhart
James Urquhart is a field technologist with almost 20 years of experience in distributed-systems development and deployment, focusing on service-oriented architectures, cloud computing, and virtualization. James is a market strategist for cloud computing at Cisco Systems and an adviser to EnStratus, though the opinions expressed here are strictly his own. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET.
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James Urquhart
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Updated to include links to Opencloudmanifesto.org.

As widely discussed since Wednesday night's leak of its existence, the Open Cloud Manifesto--originally authored by IBM--has been released for public consumption.

This had been a difficult weekend for the document, first outed by Microsoft's Steven Martin and then leaked in its entirety by my Overcast co-host, Geva Perry, the next day.

The discussion of the document has been muted, in part because the document is not a standards declaration or contract attached to any action or entity. Instead, it serves as a simple statement of principles that almost any cloud participant would agree with--at least publicly. However, the process in which it was brought into existence has been debated ferociously and may signify a changing of the guard in the standards world.

What is perhaps more interesting, however, is the list of signatories to the document. The list below is official as of Monday morning, according to my contact at IBM:

IBM
Sun Microsystems
VMWare
AT&T
Telefonica
Cisco Systems
EMC
SAP
Advanced Micro Devices
Elastra
rPath
Juniper Networks
Red Hat
Hyperic
Akamai
Novell
Sogeti
Rackspace
RightScale
GoGrid
Aptana
CastIron
EngineYard
Eclipse
SOASTA
F5
LongJump
NC State
Enomaly
Nirvanix
OMG
Computer Science Corp.
Boomi
Reservoir
Appistry
Heroku

Note that the "big four" of cloud computing, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com, are not signatories. However, several major players are on it, including my employer, Cisco--as well as EMC, Sun, VMware, and a host of key start-ups and established vendors throughout the industry.

There is a Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum meeting scheduled to be held Monday night in conjunction with Cloud Expo in New York City in which many, if not all of the signatories, and several that refused to sign (including Microsoft) will gather to talk about the future of cloud standards.

This could either be a historic meeting--or the final nail in the Manifestogate coffin.

The document itself is available on Scribd, or as a PDF from the official Opencloudmanifesto.org site or Perry's Thinking Out Cloud blog.