The consortium’s includes vendors such as IBM and Sun, end-user organizations like Eli Lilly, financial services companies, and U.S. and U.K. government officials.

Several new committees and organizations promoting have popped up this year. But the Open Group says it aims to contribute something unique by focusing on enterprise requirements for cloud computing, rather than the nitty-gritty technology details.

“The last thing this industry needs is more competing and contradictory information on emerging technologies like cloud computing,” says Dave Lounsbury, the Open Group’s vice president of collaboration services.

The group will meet weekly with a first goal of publishing a business scenario for enterprise cloud computing, which “will help companies identify and understand business needs relative to cloud computing and thereby derive the requirements that the architecture development must address,” according to the Open Group. The idea is to help businesses make decisions about how to procure and use cloud computing services.

The Open Group says it has been discussing end-user requirements and potential vendor lock-in problems related to the cloud with its members for about a year. Enterprise IT shops want to know how they can use cloud services to gain new flexibility and elasticity in computing resources, and also how to address security concerns, the group says. In particular, is important to businesses, both in terms of preventing unauthorized access to company resources and managing multiple identity mechanisms in a way that is not burdensome to end users, Lounsbury says.