"There's a big potential downside to premature standardization," said Monty Taylor, a Sun official working on Project Drizzle, a fork of the MySQL database designed for cloud scalability. Some working group might, for instance, publish a 700-page document that actually stifles standardization efforts, he explained.

More mainstream ISVs will move into the cloud, such as what Sun did Wednesday with its application server, said Mike Culver, evangelist for the Amazon Web Services cloud platform. He also noted that mainstream applications like ERP are moving into the cloud.