The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) has expanded its scope beyond cloud best practices, adding a workgroup that will focus exclusively on the ways enterprises use “big data”.

The Data Services Workgroup will start by documenting usage model requirements to increase enterprises ability to collect, manage and analyze big data securely, the alliance said Monday.

Dennis Curran, head of strategy and innovation at National Australia Bank and ODCA steering committee member, said big data opportunity extended across geographies and industries.

“The ODCA's work will help drive interoperable standards that enhance big data frameworks to be cloud ready - from manageability to security,” he said. ”This will benefit ODCA's members by accelerating solution delivery.”

The alliance is a consortium of global end-user organizations working to standardize enterprise requirements for modern IT deployments. Its steering committee includes companies like BMW, Lockheed Margin, Marriott, UBS, Deutsche Bank and others.

Its first product was a set of usage models for enterprise cloud services.

The new workgroup’s objectives include creating usage models and define requirements for security, manageability and interoperability of emerging big data frameworks with traditional data management and warehousing solutions.

The alliance expects to release these usage models in the second half of 2012.

Members of the workgroup plan to develop reference architectures and proof-of-concept set-ups based on the usage models. These would be distributed with software and hardware vendors for testing.