Tech vendors, be warned: The next generation user group has arrived on the scene, and this time its members will force the world's biggest IT companies to listen closely.The recently formed Open Data Center Alliance, representing more than $50 billion in IT spending, has loaded its steering committee up with big names like Lockheed Martin, BMW, China Life, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Marriott, the National Australia Bank, Shell and UBS. Terremark, although a vendor, is chairing the steering committee. But as a builder of cloud and hosting services, Terremark is keenly interested in making sure the likes of IBM, HP, Cisco and Microsoft take notice. Chipmaker Intel is also involved with the alliance as atechnical advisor. How dead is the PBX really?As the name suggests, the Open Data Center Alliance wants to ensure interoperability across core networking and cloud technologies, especially those provided by vendors that compete against each other. Technologies and concepts on the agenda include interoperable storage protocols, unified networking, policy-based power management, trusted computing pools and compliance with security requirements, dynamic workload placement, cloud "on-boarding" and provisioning, and flexible licensing models.