The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) is holding its Forecast event in San Francisco in June, and I’ve been invited to moderate the panel discussing Virtual Machine Interoperability. As moderator, I’ll be far more interested in facilitating insights from panel and audience than in wittering on about what I think, so I wanted to use this blog post to begin getting some of the issues clear in my mind. What is VM interoperability, and why does it matter? From time to time, I write about Open Data. This has nothing to do with that. The Open Data Center Alliance is interested in data centres, not data. The Alliance was established back in 2010 with Intel driving things forward, and now claims over 300 member organisations, including the likes of BMW, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Deutsche Bank and Marriott Hotels. According to the ODCA website, we came together to deliver a unified voice for emerging data center and cloud computing requirements. Our mission is to speed the migration to cloud computing by enabling the solution and service ecosystem to address IT requirements with the highest level of interoperability and standards. Much of the Alliance’s work involves identifying customer requirements and capturing these in a series of usage […]