March 27, 2009, 3:11 PM — Let's put the speculation about who's behind the Open Cloud Manifesto to rest right now: InfoWorld has learned that IBM is leading the charge. That's according to two cloud vendors who said they signed the document.
"We are part of the manifesto," said Pankaj Malviya, CEO of Longjump, which provides an on-demand platform for business applications. "We worked with IBM."
[ InfoWorld's Tom Sullivan interviewed author Nick Carr about the many ways cloud computing will disrupt IT. | And Gartner this week projected that cloud spending will skyrocket in 2009. ]
Big Blue, of course, is not working alone. Malviya did not know all the companies involved but mentioned Cisco and possibly some apps vendors. Amazon and Hewlett-Packard are also rumored to be involved, and the list is certainly longer.
"IBM is who reached out to us, too," said Bob Moul, CEO of on-demand integration provider Boomi. "We read it and it's kind of innocuous, like motherhood and apple pie, hard to argue with." And so Boomi, like LongJump, signed it.
Microsoft, however, took some issue with the document in a middle-of-the-night blog post written by Steve Martin, a Microsoft developer program product manager. Martin wrote that Microsoft was disappointed by the lack of openness in the manifesto's development.
That reaction surprised Rueven Cohen, founder and CTO of Enomaly, and one of the manifesto's authors, who fired back that the drafters have been in "active discussions with Microsoft" and that it "has literally come together in the last couple of weeks."
When asked about the confusion, Boomi's Moul explained, "I don't know about all that. IBM approached us about a week before it was to be released."
LongJump's Malviya, meanwhile, said he did not find the process or resulting document to be final or closed to contribution. "This is a declaration that we want portability, so let's start working toward it."
IBM's PR firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But Big Blue on its Web site has an "architectural manifesto" that of course begins with "cloud computing."
The Open Cloud Manifesto is slated to be released on Monday.
