Zürich, Wednesday 26 January 2011 – CloudSigma AG, the public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider based in Switzerland, today announced inclusion in the jclouds and Libcloud interoperability standards. Customers of CloudSigma can now develop cloud infrastructure based on either standard and deploy it seamlessly across multiple clouds including CloudSigma, Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, GoGrid and many more.

Patrick Baillie, CEO commented 'A key tenet of our approach has always been delivering on the promise of open computing in the cloud. We very much see IaaS modeled around a utility delivery model; a fundamental aspect of this is customer mobility and interoperability. Our inclusion in the jclouds and Libcloud platforms forms part of our general commitment and strategy to reduce friction between public IaaS clouds.'

The rapid emergence of cloud computing over the last few years has spawned a divergent field of vendors each offering their own version of IaaS. A significant concern registered by potential cloud computing users has been vendor lock-in. CloudSigma has created a unique FTP gateway allowing complete data portability, inclusion within the Jclouds and Libcloud standards addresses cloud architectural and API aspects of potential vendor lock-in.

jclouds and Libcloud, defining standards for IaaS
Both jclouds and Libcloud have gained significant traction within the IaaS space amongst leading vendors. The ability for customers to manage multiple proprietary clouds through single interfaces has proved very attractive. Developing software that can be flexibly deployed across a large number of disparate clouds retains customer flexibility and vendor independence.

For example jclouds allows users to control multiple clouds using a common interface, as well as hooks to perform CloudSigma-specific commands when customers need them. While jclouds is a library, there are command-line tools available that use jclouds.  For example, it is possible to setup clusters like Hadoop with Whirr or design and manage custom environments with Pallet. jclouds represents a highly inclusive standard.

Combining Standards with Innovation
As a company CloudSigma is committed to combining innovation with inclusive standards. Although both aims might seem contradictory, CloudSigma aims to reconcile both by combining compatibility with cross-platform standards with new innovative opt-in features that are CloudSigma specific.

Patrick Baillie, CEO continued "Standards have an important role to play in driving cloud adoption. Customers need to be able to move between vendors in a friction free manner. On the other hand standards can entrench old practices and limit innovation; that is why we are so excited to be working with jclouds and Libcloud. With jclouds for example, customers can use standardised and innovative features of our cloud through the same cross-platform interface."