IBM has decided to make its cloud services and software based on open standards. The move is considered important for the sector given IBM’s prominence.

The company adds that its decision will also lead to more “innovation” in cloud computing. “Without industry-wide open standards for cloud computing, businesses will not be able to fully take advantage of the opportunities associated with interconnected data, such as mobile computing and big data,” IBM said in a statement released on Monday.

On Monday, the technology giant also unveiled a cloud offering based on open standards, including OpenStack. It will make it easier and quicker to manage an enterprise-grade cloud, the statement said.

"History has shown that standards and open source are hugely beneficial to end customers and are a major catalyst for innovation," Robert LeBlanc, IBM senior vice president of Software added. "Just as standards and open source revolutionized the Web and Linux, they will also have a tremendous impact on cloud computing. IBM has been at the forefront of championing standards and open source for years, and we are doing it again for cloud computing. The winner here will be customers, who will not find themselves locked into any one vendor — but be free to choose the best platform based on the best set of capabilities that meet their needs."

In addition, the company will offer IBM SmartCloud Monitoring Application Insight as well as IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator, a new software that can increase flexibility and will no longer require “the need to develop specific interfaces for different cloud services.” IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator is available in Beta version now, and will be generally available later in 2013.

In a review of the latest move from IBM, All Things D says, “It’s good news for potential IBM customers because it means they can mix and match service and equipment vendors — Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Rackspace are also big OpenStack fans — without worrying about getting stuck with one.”

“Everyone is talking about the cloud, but in order for it to have real scale and impact, it’s pretty clear that standards and open source are going to be pretty important,” Angel Diaz, IBM’s vice president for Software Standards, Open Source and High-Performance Computing, told All Things D. “Without standards, the cloud is going to be complex, not simple, and clients will be stuck with one vendor.”

The global market for cloud services will total $131 billion during 2013, TechZone360 reported based on data from Gartner. That is an 18.5 percent jump this year, compared to $111 billion in 2012..