Are cloud standards just pie in the sky?

The spectre stalking cloud computing is customers' fear of vendor lock-in — and one way to banish those misgivings is to increase interoperability through the introduction of standards. But how far are we from true standards for the cloud? At the recent Cloud Expo Europe conference in London, ZDNet UK broached the subject with a group of experts — Derek Kay of Deloitte MCS, Professor John Darlington of Imperial College London, Linux International's Jon 'maddog' Hall, and IBM's Linux advocate Bob Sutor.