Did IBM expect to kick off a storm with what appeared to be an innocuous document called the Open Cloud Manifesto? All the company intended, according to the IBM spokesman who circulated the manifesto, was to “initiate a conversation that will bring together the emerging cloud community (both cloud users and cloud suppliers) around a core set of principles.”

Microsoft, which has its own cloud initiative in the works, immediately went ballistic. Google appeared to sign on initially but reportedly has backed out. Cisco, another initial signer of the manifesto, may pull out, too. Amazon.com, probably the biggest cloud player to date, never signed on board in the first place.

Increasingly, financial applications and the IT infrastructure to support finance will be coming from the cloud. NeoSystems, for example, is putting Lumigent’s AppGRC product in the cloud and delivering it as a SaaS offering.

The Open Cloud Manifesto is about as radical or revolutionary as motherhood and apple pie. The purpose is “to initiate a conversation that will bring together the emerging cloud computing community (both cloud users and cloud providers) around a core set of principles … that these core principles are rooted in the belief that cloud computing should be as open as all other IT technologies.” To a casual reader, this seems pretty harmless. wiredFINANCE has addressed cloud computing before.

So, why a manifesto now? The document answers by observing that “the industry needs an objective, straightforward conversation about how this new computing paradigm [cloud computing] will impact organizations, how it can be used with existing technologies, and the potential pitfalls of proprietary technologies that can lead to lock-in and limited choice.”

Whoa! Can you hear the alarm klaxons ringing in technology companies? Words like proprietary, lock-in. and limited choice are loaded code words that instantly rile some technology companies, especially Microsoft.

From the standpoint of the finance department, cloud computing should be welcome. According to the manifesto, the cloud enables “the ability to scale and provision computing power dynamically in a cost-efficient way and the ability of the consumer (end user, organization, or IT staff) to make the most of that power without having to manage the underlying complexity of the technology.” It goes on to list 10 aspects of computing the cloud will address, from scalability to security and governance to minimizing start-up costs and more.

The blow-up around the Open Cloud Manifesto may be best understood as some big technology players jealously guarding their turf along with some equally big egos out of joint because they weren’t stroked in the right way. In that sense, the blow-up has little or nothing to do with cloud computing.

Whether the Open Cloud Manifesto gets widely embraced or not doesn’t really matter. There are plenty of organizations, like the Open Cloud Consortium, that already advocate for cloud computing. Cloud computing is simply the latest iteration of a technology trend as old as time-sharing. It won’t stop here; expect more iterations in the future. ###