"People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo."

- Max Eastman

Last week we saw the announcement of the Open Data Center Alliance, a confederation of IT's biggest spenders dedicated to using their collective spending might to make cloud computing less of a threat to their current way of life.

OK, they didn't exactly put it that way.  To hear them tell it, their goal is to "Define Requirements for Next Generation Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure" and to assert those requirements in the form of a "Vendor-Agnostic Roadmap" that will "guide their data center and cloud purchasing decisions today and for planning their data center deployments of the future."

But then, twice, the announcement pointed out the "over $50 billion in collective IT spending" controlled by alliance members as if to tell the industry, "we pay your bills and you'll do as we say."  They even had an IDC pundit on hand to gush about how the alliance "puts the power of designing the data center into the hands of IT managers."

And, the last sentence in the announcement clearly states the membership litmus test: "Any company building cloud or data center infrastructure who is unencumbered by vendor interests is encouraged to apply for membership."  Unencumbered by vendor interests? Which vendors are they talking about?

Clearly it isn't Intel, who is serving as a non-voting technical advisor to the alliance.  And, it isn't hosting provider Terremark, the only non-end-user company on the steering committee.  And it isn't applications providers like Amdocs and Logica, mobile device providers like Nokia and Motorola, or outsourcing providers like AT&T and Verizon Data Services; they, and more like them, are all members.

Don Clark of the Wall Street Journal teased out a partial answer through his access to the Intel guy, who fingered AMD for their chip-level security that may differ from Intel's, and to the Terremark guy, who pointed to the incompatibility of different vendors' hypervisors, and to someone else who makes a case about differences between different cluster management consoles.  It seems that the vendors the alliance wants to exclude are cloud computing innovators and upstarts, unless, of course, they can innovate without deviating from standards and the status quo.

It is worth broadly noting that every mention of cloud computing by the alliance is tightly adjunctive to the term "data center", as in "data center and cloud infrastructure", or "data center and cloud purchasing decisions", and "data center and cloud usage models."  The only exception to this is a few references made by Intel and others to "internal and external clouds", which have been misrepresented in the press as being synonymous with "private and public cloud" and thus implying a future inclusion of public clouds in the alliance's world view.

Wrong!  To this bunch, cloud computing means virtualization and not much else, and all clouds are preferably private; internal means on premises and external means outsourced.  The success of the public cloud is the last thing they want to see, because it will mean no more vendor-paid dinners, tee times, and box seats, the end of their headcount, their capital expense budget, their data center dominion - EOJ.

The public cloud will replace all that with an efficient, unseen utility, manifest only by the service delivered and a monthly bill for that service, just as surely as alternating current did away with the on-premises direct current power plants found in most large enterprises at the start of the previous century.

Even if they wanted to, could the world's largest companies rely on the public cloud for mission-critical computing today or any time soon?  Of course they couldn't - not now and not soon.  But, if they wanted to, that day would have come a lot sooner for them than it will now that they have chosen instead to spend fifty billion a year to forestall it by subsidizing the Big IT status quo.

Meanwhile, the small businesses that would compete with those sleepy giants will never have been in a better position to do so, thanks to the public cloud.  For a few thousand dollars a month paid to Amazon or Force.com, a small company can obtain today the computing power needed to run a world-scale business and will gain access to the kinds of competitiveness-enhancing vendor-specific innovation eschewed by the Open Data Center Alliance.