A CLOUD computing community consortium to help develop industry standards and a rating system of cloud computing companies was launched this week by CA Technologies (formerly Computer Associates) and Carnegie Mellon University.

Cloudcommons.com is to be the online home of a new Cloud Commons Consortium industry group which will produce an independent “service measurement index” (SMI) scoring system that “will be the TripAdvisor” for parties interested in getting an insight into both major and small cloud services providers, said Laura McCluer, vice president, Cloud Community, CA Technologies.

Providers will be ranked by the consortium with a numerical score out of 100. Alongside the numerical score sits a star-rating system that site users can contribute to themselves.

Initial partners in the consortium include industry analysts Gartner and Forrester, as well as companies like Linux provider Red Hat and industry associations like US telecommunications industry body TMForum.

“It’s a public resource that we’ve created,” said David Hodgson, senior vice president, CA Technologies. “This will be a big partnership, a big consortium of people.”

He says any company can participate and add content to the site, but notes it is not a commercial site where businesses can promote products or services.

The site includes blogs, service ratings, editorial content, provider ratings, a marketplace, and other features. “It’s a way of taking a group of industry partners that could potentially be competitors in other situations, and letting them work together,” said Jeff Perdue, senior scientist, Carnegie Mellon University.

He said the reason for creating the consortium is that services are increasingly moving to the cloud, where there are “potentially some compelling cost and quality benefits in some cases”, but these remain unquantified.

“What we’ll do is quantify. We hope to create standard definitions in the area of cloud computing, define the framework, and find a standard way of describing and documenting service measures.”

A draft proposal suggests evaluating cloud services in the areas of agility, risk, security, cost, quality and capability.

Research work on companies done for Carnegie Mellon by an industry analyst firm has been used to populate the ratings initially, McCluer said.

“This will be a single source to go to for information about the cloud, and the place to go for information,” she said.

The project was announced at CAWorld, CA Technologies regular industry conference in Las Vegas.