Championing “open” and calling for standards has become the first stalling action by late-movers in technology spaces. They see opportunity passing by and try to hold back progress and FUD the market by yelling about proprietary solutions, vendor lock-in, and a lack of standards. Many well-intentioned IT folks follow along: After all, who doesn’t want openness, standardization, and interoperability?

As cloud computing becomes more mainstream, investors will start looking to get in on the act. With that in mind, a friend and I began discussing which public companies were getting into the cloud computing market and to what extent. I have put together the following list, and encourage comments, suggestions, and contributions.

Outages happen; big horrible nasty outages happen. In a career which now spans over twenty years, I’ve been involved with probably half a dozen; from PDUs catching fire due to overload to failed air-conditioning to wrong application of the EPO*. I have been involved in numerous tests; failing over services and whole data-centres on a regular basis and for most of these tests, the end-user would not have been aware anything was happening.

I seem to be doing a lot of thinking about clouds, dynamic data centres and what it all means. I do believe that the architectures of the future will become increasingly dynamic and virtualised. I was playing with EC2 and AWS at the weekend and I can see a time that I won’t bother the ridiculous amount of hardware that I have at home for playing with virtual appliances and ’stuff.’ And I can see that it makes increasing amount of sense for a lot of the things we do at work but….I have some questions/thoughts about storage in the public cloud and to a certain extent, the private cloud.

How did a online bookseller become potentially the most important IT Supplier in the world? Were their employees not simply selling books but also devouring them to solve their own internal problems? And without Amazon beginning to scare the beejesus out of the traditional IT suppliers, would we have cloud?

Reuven Cohen of Enomaly has penned an Open Cloud Manifesto. This might not have been news but for a curious backlash when two big cloud vendors, Microsoft and Amazon, refused to sign on, although IBM, Sun, and many others have endorsed it. In my opinion, the Open Cloud Manifesto is interesting, forward-thinking, provocative, and a bit naive.

While the bulk of Sun-related news this week relates to reported talks of a buyout by IBM, the company took a break from negotiations to introduce their own cloud computing and storage infrastructure, challenging Amazon, Google, Rackspace, and perhaps VMware, Microsoft, and Nirvanix.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been using Zumodrive, another cloud storage offering. This week Zumodrive released their iPhone client, which enables storage to be synchronised to an iPhone or iPod Touch device.