Internet weather forecast: cloudy, with lots of smartphones.

Transition to Internet cloud is becoming unstoppable. One of the strongest indications of impending massive growth is concerted industry efforts to standardize a new technology. By standardizing, market players try to turn a unique technical solution into a commodity so that they can ship boatloads of cheap substitutes as well as complimentary products.

Today, the Open Virtualization Alliance, a standards consortium of companies focused on server-side virtualization, announced new membership numbers - 200 from 65 three month ago. According to CNet, the key issues they are trying to address:

• Economics--VMware [the dominant virtualization vendor] currently controls pricing. Having a credible choice gives customers an ability to negotiate with their vendors. An open alternative gives more leverage.
•  ...They [VMWare] are also seeing customers moving from testing private clouds to starting to deploy automated, standardized infrastructure at scale.

Even if the consortium does not succeed for a while - standards always take time - the standardization effort itself shows that:
a) the technology works and many people know how to produce it;
b) the technology scales, i.e. it can be deployed in a large number of instances;
c) the need to scale the technology is real.

In addition to that, Microsoft announced that Windows 8, its next generation OS will be more virtualization friendly than Windows 7, and [separately] the company is in discussions with Comcast and Verizon to enable video streaming to XBox. Again, the intent is to make the cloud cheap and scalable.

tags: cloud, system, s-curve, infrastructure, information, computing, 10X, growth, source, microsoft, internet