The Open Data Center Alliance, an independent consortium of global IT leaders aimed at providing a unified vision for long-term data center requirements, today fulfilled its promise of collaboration with solution providers by establishing of a new class of membership specifically designed to enable solution providers to provide input on the organization’s Usage Model Roadmap, while keeping the Roadmap pure to the Alliance’s mission of publishing unbiased IT requirements for data center innovation.

“Enabling solution providers a method for participation while keeping true to their established charter is a major step forward for the Open Data Center Alliance in fulfilling its mission for defining and developing requirements for the future of the data center,” said Matthew Eastwood, group vice president, Enterprise Platform Research at IDC. “Bringing the voice of the end-user community together with key providers of data center and cloud infrastructure solutions is going to ultimately drive usage models that reflect both IT requirements and technology innovation.”

The introduction of this new membership class comes as the organization passes an important milestone of over 150 total members, more than doubling the total membership since launch of the group in October, 2010. The Solution Provider membership class aimed at providers of hardware and software for data center and cloud environments will be added to existing membership classes: Adopter, Contributor, and Steering Committee. Details on membership opportunities are available at:http://www.opendatacenteralliance.org/membership.

The news of this class of membership comes as the organization continues to expand its leadership and chartered workgroups. The Alliance Steering Committee is comprised of 13 global IT leaders from the following companies: BMW; Capgemini; China Life; China Unicom Group; Deutsche Bank; JPMorgan Chase; Lockheed Martin; Marriott International, Inc.; National Australia Bank; Shell Global Solutions, Inc.; Terremark; UBS; and The Walt Disney Company.

The group also announced the formation of a China workgroup chartered to address the priorities and goals in data center and cloud innovation in the China region today and is expected to accelerate local language collaboration to ensure the Alliance’s global voice is being captured. The workgroup, which is being led by Steering Committee members China Life and China Unicom Group, was formalized at an Alliance members meeting in Beijing held earlier this week, and will provide region-specific input to Alliance technical workgroups. More information about this workgroup can be found on the Alliance website.