The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) is a group aimed at fostering open, integrated, enterprise-ready cloud services. And one mantra is to avoid vendor lock-in at most any cost.
This week ODCA made news with a revamp of its Cloud Maturity Model (CMM), which encompasses Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and Information as a Service (Info-aaS).
As part of the maturity model, ODCA released a paper walking through key issues, and serving as a bit of roadmap for enterprises moving toward the cloud.
“The ODCA CMM provides an end-to-end visualization of how the enterprise cloud develops over time, starting with no cloud adoption and progressing through five maturity levels that eventually lead to defining an enterprise's capabilities and requirements for deploying full-scale federated cloud services that are open, secure and interoperable,” the organization said. “The CMM represents the enterprise's ability to sustainably adopt cloud services within defined governance and control parameters and includes assessment of cloud architecture, infrastructure, information and management. Organizations can use the CMM to identify where they currently are on the cloud maturity model and to determine where they want to be in the future based on the enterprise's unique business goals and criteria outlined in the CMM.”
ODCA has an array of vendor and enterprise partners, including AT&T, BMW, Intel, and The Walt Disney Company, offering insight from the supplier and customer sides of the aisle.
The ODCA, now three years old, has Intel as a technical advisor. The idea behind its usage and maturity models is to ease cloud migration and optimize cloud usage.
“The ODCA Cloud Maturity Model is an important resource for enterprises just beginning to establish a path to cloud and for enterprises already deploying cloud services and solutions,” said Ryan Skipp, Portfolio and Solution Development at DTAG/T-Systems and Chair of the ODCA Manageability and Services Workgroup. “The CMM provides information that can be used immediately to analyze enterprise cloud readiness and as a business and technology roadmap for continuously adding new services as enterprise cloud requirements evolve.”
ODCA has some 25 different usage models, and are of help in the building of new cloud services.
Older Maturity Models
ODCA isn’t the only one with a maturity model. Microsoft has IO, which is much more aimed at on-premises shops. The IO model, built to lower costs and increase efficiency, is really about optimizing Microsoft products, which in Microsoft parlance generally means using the latest versions.
At the lowest run is Core Infrastructure, which refers to server and PC architectures. Above that is Business Productivity Infrastructure and lastly Application Platform Infrastructure. As you can see, this model is really designed for the old way of computing.
There are several other maturity and optimization models.
Carnegie-Mellon has its Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), which is largely focused on people, processes, and organizations.
MIT has an operating model that has four levels: Diversification, Unification, Coordination and Replication.
Edited by
Rory J. Thompson
