Any hopes of an uncontested cloud-based data standard now appear shaky, thanks to the announcement of the Cloud Information Model (CIM) project. The CIM looks set to compete with the Open Data Initiative (ODI), which launched just over a year ago in September 2018. Both want to solve the problem of cloud-level data interoperability, but we’ve seen how IoT-type standards battles play out. The irony here, as is always the case with standards that seek to unify; as both the ODI and the CIM recruit followers, the desired objective of pooling and standardizing as much data as possible becomes ever more distant. It is not clear why the two organizations could not simply merge now and pool their resources,…