Standards help create quality products and "quality" is the quintessential component of "all value". Hence, the better the product quality, the superior the customer experience. Secondly, quality is driven by and drives innovation. And innovation has "intelligence" built into it. Hence, from the Crowd to the Cloud, standards are the Key business drivers as well as as the Key Efficiency drivers that generate enhanced and accelerated metrics over time and thus become a strategic component of any business process. Although the concept of Cloud Computing has been floating around for a while, Open Cloud Standards just like any other standards open the doors to key niche areas for improvisation and more. As an example, Cloud Computing as it seems implementation-fit today (at least from my point of view) is primarily based on the notion of virtualization. But questions like "Can you see beyond the Clouds?" (Courtsey: VoxSRUCTURE - The Fabric for a Flexible Internet Infrastructure" - http://www.voxel.net/ ) is not only
a brilliant architectural design but also one that is open source, technology-agnostic and more importantly, one that explores beyond today's Cloud Computing domain - and derives yet another "Infrastructure That Always Fits" (Courtsey Voxel again). This eventually may well be accepted by many businesses as the Gold Standard for Intelligent Cloud Computing & Implementation. Just imagine how many businesses can change gears by leveraging existing infrastructure and seamlessly integrate it with the Voxel Fabric, thereby raising the value of better-business-benefits, as they see it fit into any given infrastructure. My conclusion is that standards are always standards and will always remain as standards - the primary "standards" component that changes can be the breakthrough intelligence built into them that accelerates business efficiency and creates markets as dynamically as today's cloud bursting. Hope this answers your question. Please feel free to give your feedback. And this goes to all other FOCUS members/experts too.

Thanks for asking!

LAKSHMAN BULUSU, PISCATAWAY, NJ
balakshman@yahoo.com;
balakshman@acm.org;
http://www.lakshmanbulusu.org/