I was recently asked my views on the vCloud initiative. It's good that they are trying to create a marketplace of providers with portability between them, however it's unfortunate that the core technology is not open source as this creates an unnecessary weakness in the system.
In my view a smarter move would have been to open source the technology and act as the compliance authority to the marketplace. I suspect that this initiative will be either overtaken by an open source version or a larger proprietary "cloud" marketplace.
On the positive side, it does provide further justification to the idea of a utility computing marketplace. Though this is one where the providers hand over strategic control of the market to their technology partner.
