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MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

whether interoperability between their virtualization products
was a good idea.
VMware’s Patrick Lin, senior director of product manage-
ment at the time; Microsoft’s Bob Tenszar, director of product
management for Windows Server; and John Bara, vice presi-
dent of marketing at what was at the time XenSource (now

part of Citrix Systems), all agreed that it would be better if the
virtual machine formats could work together and said that
they were working behind the scenes to make it happen. In a
report on the occasion, I termed this evening declaration on
the benefits of interoperability “virtual kumbaya.” By night, we
sing around the campfire; by day, we go our separate ways.
Nevertheless, the big three are on the record as saying that

they are working on interoperability.
Two years later, I was reminded of the backward state of
the industry on this point when I attended the Cloud Com-
puting Forum in San Francisco in February 2009 and asked a
panel of cloud experts when we would achieve a shared virtual
machine runtime format as well as the migration format OVF.
The answers were diplomatic.
“I don’t think we’re holding back any genuine progress by
not documenting the AMI format,” said Amazon’s Jeffrey Barr.

Joseph Tobolski, Accenture’s director of cloud comput-
ing, who was on the panel, later backed up Barr. “Jeff’s point is
perfectly valid. You’ve got to wait until the time is right to rec-
oncile those different formats,” he said in an interview.
This panel illustrated the industry’s understanding that
vendors have a right to use proprietary formats until the mar-

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