"It is not only about open standards, but it is about how these standards all play together for the benefit of the customer," said Angel Diaz, VP IBM Standards, Open Source, and Cloud Labs, at the IBM PULSE Open Cloud Summit in early March of 2013. From the opening event to the final keynote, IBM Pulse 2013 was strongly and consistently focused on how to leverage OpenStack, TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration specification for Cloud), and OSLC (Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration) to create tangible customer value. Most excitingly, IBM and SAP presented a demonstration of how customers will soon be able to implement TOSCA patterns through IBM SmartCloud, eliminating the traditional pain points that come with standing up, managing and governing SAP environments.

At Pulse 2013, IBM announced the Beta of IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator, based on OpenStack, TOSCA and OSLC. SmartCloud Orchestrator constitutes IBM's new unified and open cloud management platform, consisting of three main layers. The infrastructure services layer is based on OpenStack for provisioning, configuring and managing storage, compute and network resources. The platform services layer includes virtual machine image lifecycle management capabilities and pattern services. The latter refers to IBM's so-called patterns of expertise, which include exact deployment and management instructions for the entire business service. The orchestration services layer is based on IBM's Lombardi acquisition, offering an easy-to-use business process management solution. IBM announced that later in 2013 the platform services layer and the services orchestration layer will both support the TOSCA standard. SmartCloud Orchestrator supports OSLC for continuous delivery across heterogeneous development environments and is able to deploy workloads to a software-based private cloud, IBM's integrated PureSystems or public clouds such as Amazon EC2 or IBM's SmartCloud Services.