IT departments at the end of the last decade operated with the same reckless abandon as the homesteaders of the 1889 land rush, seeking to grab up as much cloud storage capability as their budgets might allow. For too many, more was better, storage management techniques be damned. And with a department that was too little understood by anyone else in the company, few were the requisition orders that went unfulfilled.

Of course, with the late decade economic downturn came the inevitably tightened IT budgets. Too many companies found themselves with an inordinate amount of storage that was unnecessary thanks to advancements in data compression. So what is a company to do with their extra cloud presence? If news out of Germany this week is any indicator, these companies will be able to commoditize their extra storage thanks to the creation of the Deutsche Boerse Cloud Exchange AG.

Deutsche Boerse AG operates the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (Xetra) which is one of the largest stock exchanges in Europe. Providing the software solution on which the market will operate is Zimory, the Berlin-based outfit with an established expertise in cloud management software. The cloud exchange will, as a vendor neutral marketplace, allow IT resources to be traded in much the same way securities and energy are. The anticipated launch of this new exchange is slated for the first quarter of 2014.

According to a statement from Zimory, their software implementation will be characterized by its openness to integrate other cloud management stacks and standards. Consumers and sellers will, therefore, be able to buy and sell capacity with the click of a button.  The platform will enable individual users to compare similar services and distribute applications between multiple providers.

Zimory CEO Ruediger Baumann states, “Deutsche Boerse Cloud Exchange will fundamentally change how cloud computing resources are bought and sold. The time when contract negotiations took months will be over for most businesses.” He continued, “Cloud services will be provided faster and in more varied ways. New cloud computing industries, application areas and brokerage services will develop. The necessary prerequisites for this new age of cloud computing are industry standards for IaaS and a neutral, secure marketplace, which we are creating together with Deutsche Boerse group.”

Jason Verge of Data Center Knowledge points out, however, this is not the first proposed exchange for cloud capacity. As Verge notes, “The notion of a commodity-style exchange for cloud capacity emerged in 2010, shortly after Amazon Web Services began offering spot pricing for cloud instances.”

It appears industry insiders are approaching the Deutsche Boerse Cloud Exchange with considerably more confidence than its predecessors. Several outfits like Host Europe and Equinix have signed on as members of the exchange’s Early Adopter program.

Robert Jenkins, CEO of Zurich-based CloudSigma, another member of the Early Adopter program stated, “Participating in Deutsche Boers’s vendor-neutral platform of IaaS cloud computing products was a no-brainer. CloudSigma was founded on the idea that computing power should become ubiquitous, convenient and shaped by user requirements.” He continued, “Trading compute on one of the leading financial exchanges is really a great market validation of what we’ve already been working toward and will help to further drive innovation in computing.”

For the casual observer of ‘all things cloud’, this writer is going to maintain a wait-and-see approach to the eventual success or failure of this exchange endeavor. Thankfully, the first quarter of 2014 is only just around the corner.