Press Release

OASIS Approves TOSCA Standard for Deployment and Operational Management of Applications across Clouds

ASG, Axway, CA Technologies, Cisco, Citrix, Cloudsoft, EMC, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, NetApp, Primeton, Red Hat, SAP, Software AG, and Others Advance Standard for Deploying Interoperable Cloud Applications

16 January 2014 – The OASIS international open standards consortium announced the approval of the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA), Version 1.0. Designed to enhance portability, TOSCA makes it easier to deploy and manage cloud applications throughout their lifecycle without vendor lock-in, while maintaining application requirements for security, governance, and compliance. TOSCA is now an official OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification.

The core value proposition of TOSCA lies in its ability to facilitate an eco-system, enabling portable application deployment to the cloud and between compliant clouds while facilitating multi-cloud applications. TOSCA enables portable cloud application management, e.g., scaling-in, scaling-out, patching, etc., while supporting non-vendor-specific application marketplaces. Now supported by most of the major software vendors, TOSCA enables cloud applications to be portably described, modeled, packaged, adjusted, and monitored in any cloud.

“As we live in the more complex and connected world, the industry realized the need for a standards-based approach to service and application portability and lifecycle management,” recalled Paul Lipton of CA Technologies, co-chair of the OASIS TOSCA Technical Committee. “It’s gratifying to see the widespread and still growing adoption and support from both commercial solution providers and the open source community that TOSCA now enjoys.”

“Around the world, developers are turning to TOSCA to leverage their software applications across multiple cloud environments and implement truly open federated cloud services,” said Simon Moser of IBM, who also co-chairs the OASIS TOSCA group.

Evidence of TOSCA support is widespread. As part of the OASIS Standard approval process, Statements of Use were provided by Axway, HP, Huawei, IBM, the University of Stuttgart, and Vnomic. EuroCloud recently featured a TOSCA interoperability demonstration with products from Fujitsu, HP, Huawei, IBM, SAP, Vnomic, and Zenoss. Further demonstrations are planned for 2014.

TOSCA is offered for implementation on a royalty-free basis. Companies, non-profit groups, governments, academic institutions, and individuals are welcome to participate in the OASIS TOSCA Technical Committee, which continues to advance the standard based on recommendations and feedback provided by the TOSCA community.

Support for TOSCA

ASG
“TOSCA is a great move toward the cloud, beyond IaaS, and its expansion will allow greater freedom of choice amid the consumerization of IT Services,” said Pascal Vitoux, senior VP of development and CTO, ASG Software Solutions. “These values are core to our Cloud Management Platform and we are very excited about the potential an open standard like TOSCA can bring to our customers by increasing their ability to freely select vendors while accelerating their implementation and time to market for product and services.”

CA Technologies
“TOSCA will help facilitate higher levels of cloud application and service portability without vendor lock-in,” said Shridhar Mittal, general manager of Application Delivery at CA Technologies. “It breaks new ground as the first significant open standard focused on the modeling, deployment and operational management of these applications across their entire lifecycle, enabling CA Technologies to more fully realize the power of DevOps and help our customers tackle their business challenges.”

Fujitsu
“Fujitsu believes that openness of cloud computing technologies is crucial for our customers and more generally for any enterprise doing business with such technologies. The importance of portability for enterprise applications on various cloud computing infrastructures is increasing as cloud computing is utilized as an enterprise IT platform. We welcome the release of the new standard, TOSCA, in this area,” said Hiroshi Nagakura, VP, Strategy and Technology Div., Platform Strategic Planning Unit, Fujitsu Limited.

HP
“As the hybrid cloud delivery model gains traction in the market, portability and interoperability between cloud environments and content creation based on standards will be critical. The release of TOSCA 1.0 will play a key role in providing this capability. With HP’s open and extensible architecture for cloud management, we enable our customers to broker services across multiple hybrid clouds via TOSCA based models and are committed to continuing to support this standard,” said Atul Garg, VP & GM, Cloud Automation & Management, HP Software.

IBM
“IBM congratulates the TOSCA TC on the delivery of this important specification,” said Angel Diaz, IBM VP Software Standards & Cloud Labs. “I’m proud that IBM has been a key contributor to the specification as well as the multi-company TOSCA Interop at EuroCloud, as this was exemplary proof that TOSCA meets and delivers on the market requirement for an Open and interoperable Cloud.”

SAP
“SAP is happy to see TOSCA reach this significant milestone,” said Erich Clauer, VP, Industry Standards and Open Source at SAP. “Moving advanced enterprise application landscapes to the cloud, or moving them from one cloud to another, is important for SAP customers and partners. TOSCA will enable portability between cloud providers for applications like those from SAP.”

Software AG
“Software AG has been at forefront of leading industry standards, recognizing the need for interoperable portable solutions for our customers. TOSCA provides a standard and interoperable way to describe cloud applications of next generation that are portable across disparate cloud providers, enabling smoother migration of existing applications to cloud. As a co-author and co-submitter of TOSCA and an active member of the TOSCA TC, we are happy to see TOSCA 1.0 attain the status of OASIS Standard,” said Rob Tiberio, Chief Architect & SVP R&D Software AG.


Additional information

OASIS TOSCA Technical Committee

TOSCA OASIS Standard

About OASIS
OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society. OASIS promotes industry consensus and produces worldwide standards for cloud computing, security, privacy, M2M, IoT, content technologies, business transactions, emergency management, and other applications. OASIS open standards offer the potential to lower cost, stimulate innovation, grow global markets, and protect the right of free choice of technology. OASIS members broadly represent the marketplace of public and private sector technology leaders, users and influencers. The consortium has more than 5,000 participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members in 100 countries. http://www.oasis-open.org.

Press contact: Carol Geyer, OASIS Senior Director of Communications