An alliance of Fortune 500 companies has formed to set the standards for cloud interoperability.

A consortium of IT professionals representing 70 global companies has formed the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) to find a way of bringing cloud computing into the business environment in a more structured way that prevents lock-in to any one computing supplier, says ZDNet UK.

Mario Mueller, BMW Group's vice president for IT infrastructure, who is spearheading the effort, offered this:

Vendors will not be members, but we will encourage dialogue with the industry. Intel's history in driving IT organisations makes it a perfect fit for [technical adviser].

According to BBC News, the ODCA's Cloud 2015 vision aims to create a federated cloud with common standards for both hardware and software vendors. Another goal of the alliance is to ensure that all devices are interoperable when accessing services via the cloud.