If the cloud is really another word for the “Internet,” then it would stand to reason that the cloud computing industry should be collaborating more with the Web community, according to Jeff Jaffe, CEO of standards body Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C (News - Alert)).

Since cloud came onto the IT scene, there has been a growing demand for standards to bring some sanity to the cloud computing market. Both buyers and sellers have their reasons to want common ways to do things such as transfer data from one cloud-based app or infrastructure to another.

So it makes sense that cloud can glean many lessons from the Web, which has seen explosive growth since its inception in 1989 and helped to create the $8 trillion of online revenue that McKinsey estimated was generated in 2009. Compare that with the fast-growing public cloud services market, which is forecast to grow 18.5 percent in 2013 to total $131 billion worldwide, up from $111 billion in 2012, according to Gartner (News - Alert). Jaffe maintains that cloud adoption would accelerate if the industry had standardized technologies.

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He attributes the Web’s explosive growth to the fact that it was built in an open manner to serve the needs of a wider base. This approach has led to Web technologies being used on platforms as different as a PC Web browser to in-car entertainment systems.

At this point, the same cannot be said about cloud.

Jaffe, who spoke at the Cloud World Forum in London in June, said now is the time to start the process of standardizing the platform architectures and technologies underpinning cloud services – such as software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service -- according to a report from ZDNet.

“The problem for those who want a standard infrastructure and the flexibility to move from one service to another is the silos are getting deeper,” Jaffe said.

While several cloud standards bodies have emerged, Jaffe said that’s not necessarily a good thing.

“The good news is there are 15 different places looking at cloud standards; the bad news is that there are 15 different places looking at cloud standards,” he said.  

While open source technologies such as OpenStack and Eucalyptus have helped enable more innovation, open source does not provide the same level of interoperability as open standards, Jaffe added.

As TMCnet recently reported, OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus are the clear contenders as the open source infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) stacks most tapped into for building enterprise private clouds. But the question remains: Is one really better than the other? Click here to read the story.