A long list of companies has signed on to the Open Cloud Manifesto, including IBM, Sybase, Heroku and Hewlett-Packard, but others such as Microsoft and Amazon are notably absent. Microsoft has from development of the document.

Another distinctive thing about the OCI is that it is designed to be a community initiative. "This is individuals acting without any vendor input on behalf of the community," Ramji said.

Once the group has settled on its principles, it will start certifying services as compliant. That will involve testing a service by entering data, removing it and using the available APIs (application programming interfaces) to access the data. Initially, that process will be done on a volunteer basis by members of the community. However, Ramji said some "fairly large providers" have expressed interest in the initiative, so the group hopes eventually to obtain funding to build a more formal, full-time certification process.

After its founding in 2009, the OCI stalled twice because its founder, Sam Johnston, changed jobs. Johnston is now director of cloud and IT services at Equinix. But board members think the time is right for the initiative to get going. "We're at a tipping point where cloud adoption is growing much faster and people are adding more data to cloud services than we saw in the early days, so this is a critical moment for something like this to be formalized," said Shanley Kane, head of developer relations at Apigee and an OCI board member.

Still, the group may meet with some resistance from longtime cloud service providers. "Someone needs to remind me why we need another cloud standards org? What's different this time? Why should we care?" on Tuesday in reference to OCI's launch. Cohen was one of the authors of the Open Cloud Manifesto.