Alexis (and all),

I have continued to watch the OCCI list with interest, and will make a
concerted effort to review the current proposals to come back with
comments in the next few days. My apologies for myself or my team not
having interacted more already, but current work commitments within the
company have prevented this so far.

We made an open pledge some months back that we would willingly adopt a
new API standard based on what made most commercial sense, and I
certainly think OCCI has come a long way towards this.

It was great to meet you in Prague and discuss our respective goals... I was happy to know that you guys were monitoring our progress and I really hope we can deliver something useful for you sooner rather than later.

I think the main selling points for cloud providers like yourselves are:

Interoperability for the parts we care about while still allowing you room to innovate/differentiate (if we make it too tight the commoditisation takes over)... that translates to customers being able to migrate to you easily (which is a double edged sword in that if you fail to deliver they can leave you easier too) and perhaps more importantly more tools like desktop management clients and autonomic scaling (e.g. RightScale).
Access to enterprise users who are currently kicking the tyres with PoCs and pilots, but who will likely end up with a more "enterprise" solution like VMware provided by a traditional hosting provider. If we meet their needs then you'll gain access to a segment that you might not have otherwise been able to reach.

As usual open to 1 (or 2) on 1 calls with you/your staff for gathering requirements and feedback but it'll have to wait until next week unless you happen to be in Lisbon.

Cheers,

Sam