Oracle hopes to create a standard for running private clouds with its Cloud Resource Model API.
It is now up to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) to consider this proposal as a possible standard.
The API provides cloud management software a set of hooks hide provisioning service low-level configuration details from an laaS-styled offering. It could also allow users to deploy virtual servers across clouds run on different hardware platforms.
The set has 2 pieces-- the model describing the relationships between different types of resources (like storage volumes and virtual machines), and the protocol used to interact with those resources.
Oracle faces competition from Red Hat (Deltacloud), Eucalyptus Systems (Amazon Elastic Compute) and even NASA (Openstack).