"None of this stuff is going to change things for users in the next 12 months," said Frank Gillett, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. The merger, he added, will be a success if the new group can come up with ways for making various systems work together in a grid.

Areas where standards are needed include workload distribution and management interfaces, Gillett said.

Jonathan Eunice, an analyst at Illuminata in Nashua, N.H., said various vendors were aligned with different organizations, and the groups were serving cross purposes. "A lot of energy was being diffused and burned up in the process," he said.