Social, mobile and big data may be the trends driving IT in 2012. But all of those markets have the cloud underpinning them to one degree or another. Cloud services are underpinned by cloud infrastructure which is underpinned by data center infrastructure. The cloud is really just turtles all the way down. But what I'm hearing here at the inaugural Open Data Center Alliance Forecast even is that if you want to have the highest stack of the strongest turtles, you're going to need open standards. The Open Data Center alliance is an Intel-formed industry peer group designed to promote and publicize best practices in the data center, generally providing a unified voice to tell vendors and service providers exactly what they want in the cloud -- from security to transparency to management to hardware design. But judging from the customer stories we've heard thus far, everybody's using the ODCA as a springboard to scalability, but in a different way.