Insights into how technology and the outsourcing of R&D are changing the software industry

Last week Red Hat’s CTO Brian Stevens introduced a new initiative called Deltacloud that has a very lofty goal of simplifying the process of invoking cloud services via a new unified standard.  It address interoperability which can be an important challenge in cloud computing for ISVs.  Out of the box they have some pretty good market coverage, supporting Red Hat’s own Enterprise Virtualization, VMWare ESX and Amazon EC2 with support for Rackspace to follow.

This is a good start, but I think that this is about as far as Red Hat’s going to be able to take this.  Nowhere is there any mention of, nor do I expect support for, some of the other leading Cloud platforms from Microsoft, Oracle or Salesforce.com.  And this highlights the both the problems with the mega-vendors and the open source movement.  Open Source levels the playing field, but that is diametrically opposed to what the mega-vendors like Microsoft and Oracle want, particularly Microsoft who loves their proprietary standards.  And between Microsoft and Oracle, they control so much of the ISV ecosystem, that I don’t see how Red Hat’s Deltacloud gets any traction.  Even Stevens’ own statement talks about “creating a buzz”.  Well maybe for one day.