Sean Kelley, global CIO of Deutsche Bank, has been elected chairman of the Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council (ECLC), a cross-industry body created by the TM Forum, an international association of cloud infrastructure and services providers whose membership includes AT&T, BT, Cisco, IBM and Microsoft.

The TM Forum has so far done little to raise its profile outside of its tight-knit community of major networked service and technology vendors, but its creation of the ECLC, and the appointment of such as senior figure from the user community to lead it, is evidence that it plans to take a leading role in creating a structured market for cloud services.

The ECLC’s aim is to create standard service and interface definitions that will encourage the growth of a market in which private and public cloud services can seamlessly interact with each other.

“The best markets are always based on establishing good understanding between suppliers and consumers, where service providers properly understand what there customers needs are, and how they want to consume them,” said Kelley.

By working with the members of the TM Forum as part of the ECLC, “Deutsche Bank [can] participate in removing the risks associated with cloud services through industry standards,” he said

Ultimately, Kelley expects the ECLC initiative to help produce “an efficient global computing market similar to the energy market that we have today.” That vision may still be a little way in the future, but it is clear that banking technologist such as Kelley hope that the future will be a cloudy one.