A group of the largest businesses across the world have joined forces to provide a set of requirements for the future of cloud computing.

The Open Data Centre Alliance has been formed by 70 business members with a combined annual IT spend of £31.6bn. The alliance includes members from BMW, Shell, UBS and Deutsche Bank who will aim to set hardware and software requirements for cloud computing to tackle organisations’ challenges such as security, automation and interoperability.

Mario Mueller, steering committee member and vice-president of IT infrastructure for BMW, said, "For the first time, an independent consortium of global IT managers will work together to define requirements of datacentre and cloud environments, for today and tomorrow."

"Members are committed to the usage model road-map to guide datacentre purchasing decisions and for planning future datacentre deployments," added Mueller.

Intel is the technical advisor for the alliance and unveiled plans at Cern's Globe for Science and Innovation in Geneva, to make cloud computing more interoperable as part of its Cloud 2015 initiative to meet alliance requirements.

Boyd Davis, vice-president of Intel's architecture group, said, "In the next five years, the internet will gain five billion new users, which will choke existing infrastructure, while closed proprietary architecture will stifle innovation. There is demand for infrastructure that is open and interoperable."