OpenStack Launches as Independent Foundation, Begins Work Protecting, Empowering and Promoting OpenStack

Foundation Provides Shared Resources and Long-Term Home for Fastest Growing Open Source Cloud Community with over $10M Committed Funding from Industry Leaders

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--OpenStack ® today announced the launch of a new, independent OpenStack Foundation that will continue to promote the development, distribution and adoption of the OpenStack cloud software. As the independent home for OpenStack, the Foundation has already attracted more than 5,600 individual members, secured more than $10 million in funding and is ready to fulfill the OpenStack mission of becoming the ubiquitous cloud computing platform.

“The value of OpenStack is not only the features of the cloud computing platform, but also the openness of the OpenStack Foundation and its Open Source development community”

The goal of the OpenStack Foundation is to serve developers, users, and the entire ecosystem by providing a set of shared resources to grow the footprint of public and private OpenStack clouds, enable technology vendors targeting the platform and assist developers in producing the best cloud software in the industry.

"The launch of the OpenStack Foundation is not only an important milestone for our community, but a defining moment for the open cloud movement," said Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation. "When you look at what this community has done to innovate and make cloud technologies accessible, as well as make open source synonymous with cloud computing, you understand why huge technology industry leaders and users across the world are placing their bets on OpenStack. The opportunity for OpenStack to become the open source standard for cloud computing is real."

Like the software, membership within the OpenStack Foundation is free and accessible to anyone. Members are expected to participate in the OpenStack community through technical contributions or community building efforts.

Growth of the OpenStack platform continues on an upward trajectory. Founded in July 2010 by Rackspace and NASA with the support of 25 companies and a few dozen developers, OpenStack has since grown to more than 180 participating companies and 550 contributing developers producing six software releases in a little over two years.

To date, Rackspace has been leading and investing in community management activities, but a year ago the company announced plans to establish an independent Foundation, recognizing the community was thriving and ready for a permanent home. Rackspace has now transitioned management activities and contributed the OpenStack trademark to the new Foundation, creating even greater opportunity for diverse contributors and a vibrant ecosystem necessary for long-term success.

"Since its inception, we knew a foundation was the ultimate goal for OpenStack,” said Lew Moorman, President of Rackspace. “Today, we are proud to finalize the process by donating the assets, handing over community management and giving the OpenStack trademark to the OpenStack Foundation.”

In April 2012, intended Platinum and Gold Member companies formed a Drafting Committee to produce a set of Bylaws and legal documents for community review. In July 2012, 5,000 individuals and eighteen companies ratified the Foundation Bylaws and legal documents by signing up as members. Currently, the Foundation has eight Platinum Members including AT&T, Canonical, HP, IBM, Nebula, Rackspace, Red Hat and SUSE, and thirteen Gold Members including CCAT, Cisco, Cloudscaling, Dell, DreamHost, Mirantis, Morphlabs, NetApp, Piston Cloud Computing, Yahoo!, with Intel, NEC and VMware joining in September. Additional new companies who have begun supporting the Foundation as corporate sponsors include Brocade, eNovance, Gale Technologies, GridCentric, Huawei, Internap, Metacloud, PayPal, RiverMeadow Software, Smartscale Systems, Transcend Computing and Xemeti.

The Individual, Gold and Platinum members each make up a third of the Board of Directors, which provides strategic and financial oversight of Foundation resources and staff. Alan Clark, Director of Industry Initiatives, Emerging Standards and Open Source at SUSE, was elected Chairman of the Board, and Lew Tucker, Vice President and CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, was elected Vice Chairman of the Board.

“Our priorities and vision for the Foundation include strengthening the ecosystem, accelerating adoption and empowering the community to deliver the best cloud software out there,” said Alan Clark, Chairman of the Board. “OpenStack’s popularity and industry momentum calls for a solid operational foundation. The new board of directors is feverishly working to ensure that the Foundation is structured with the right executive leadership, staff, fiduciary models and controls all while looking to the priorities and vision for the Foundation. I am honored to serve and support this tremendously innovative community.”

“The OpenStack Foundation represents a new era of establishing open source standards for cloud computing based on multi-vendor collaboration,” said Lew Tucker, Vice Chairman of the Board. “The evolution of OpenStack to an independent foundation is a landmark achievement that reinforces the growing momentum and industry support that has galvanized around this organization and its mission.”

Separate of the Board, the fully elected OpenStack Technical Committee – an evolution of the Project Policy Board – will steward the technical direction of OpenStack software development and includes elected Project Technical Leads from each of the core software projects. Tim Bell, Operating Systems and Infrastructure Services Group Leader at CERN, was appointed by the Board of Directors to help establish a new User Committee, created to represent a broad set of enterprise, academic and service provider users with the Technical Committee and Board of Directors.

Led by Executive Director, Jonathan Bryce, the Foundation is hiring 10-12 employees who, under the strategic direction of the Board, will help carry out the OpenStack mission. Specific responsibilities include coordinating the project's infrastructure, such as systems for testing the software at scale, community building activities, and managing the OpenStack trademark, which was transferred from Rackspace following the first board meeting.

Meet the new community leaders and learn more about the Foundation at the next OpenStack Summit, October 15 – 18, in San Diego, CA.

About OpenStack ®

OpenStack is open source software for building clouds. Created to drive industry standards, end cloud lock-in and speed cloud adoption, OpenStack is a common, open platform for both public and private clouds with the support of over 180 industry leading companies, more than 5,500 Individual Members and 300,000 downloads. The open source cloud operating system enables businesses to manage compute, storage and networking resources via a self-service portal and APIs on standard hardware at massive scale. For more information and to join the community, visit www.OpenStack.org.

Canonical

"The OpenStack Foundation is leading the cloud industry in developing the most cutting-edge enterprise and carrier class cloud platform available. Ubuntu has been the reference operating system for OpenStack since the beginning and, today, more enterprises and carriers trust Ubuntu and OpenStack to deliver mission critical platforms than any other cloud platform. Canonical, as a founding platinum member of the OpenStack Foundation, contributes to the project's governance, technical development and strategy, while helping enterprises, carriers, their customers and their users benefit from the open technologies that are making the cloud more powerful, simple and ubiquitous." -- Kyle MacDonald, VP Cloud at Canonical

CCAT

“As a Taiwan based member, CCAT is excited to be a part of the OpenStack Foundation launch because it marks an important milestone for the global community. CCAT is committed to connecting Asian members with the global user community and promotion of the OpenStack standards. CCAT looks forward to contribute to the OpenStack ecosystem for both developers and users,” said Dr. Tzi-cker Chiueh, the Secretary General of the Cloud Computing Association in Taiwan (CCAT).

Cloudscaling

"Cloudscaling is delivering the most reliable, scalable and production-grade solution for building elastic infrastructure clouds based on OpenStack technology. It's the contributions of thousands of developers that have made OpenStack the only core cloud technology capable of delivering the agility, performance and economics that the IT industry has been expecting from cloud all along." -- Randy Bias, co-founder and CTO at Cloudscaling

Dell

“Dell’s commitment to OpenStack began more than two years ago as a way to help make the open source cloud more accessible to our customers, and has resulted in Dell innovations like our OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution and Crowbar, to help speed and ease deployment of cloud clusters,” said John Igoe, executive director of Dell open source cloud and big data solutions, and OpenStack Foundation board member. “The choice for an open source cloud is an important enabler for companies to build the cloud they need, and the formation of the OpenStack Foundation is an important milestone to signify the relevance of open source to customers.”

DreamHost

“DreamHost has a vision to enable the world’s entrepreneurs and developers to create, share and prosper on the Internet,” said Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost. “We passionately believe that open source software, and open, compatible cloud services, are the key to the next wave of growth and innovation worldwide. OpenStack is the right platform and community to enable this shift, and the formation of the OpenStack Foundation is another step in demonstrating the long term commitment of the community to this mission.”

HP

“Our common goal was to establish a governance model that would enable developers to innovate on the OpenStack platform, while maintaining the technical meritocracy of the OpenStack project,” said Eileen Evans, vice president and associate general counsel, Cloud Computing and Open Source, HP and board member of the Foundation.

IBM

"Today's announcement ushers in a new era for the cloud interoperability, enabling OpenStack to drive deeper industry collaboration and accelerate momentum for critical industry standards," said Angel Diaz, vice president, Software Standards at IBM. "Users in all industries can be confident betting on OpenStack with its growing number of members, strong user community, maturing technology and growing adoption."

Intel

"Enterprises and service providers deploying OpenStack are choosing Intel Architecture as the foundation of their clouds to optimize the performance, scalability, and security of their infrastructure," said Doug Fisher, corporate vice president, Software and Services Group at Intel. “Intel helps ensure that the building blocks of OpenStack, including operating environments such as Linux, KVM, and Xen, take full advantage of Intel Architecture. We are pleased to join the OpenStack Foundation as a Gold member to enable innovative cloud usage models in open source, foster the adoption of OpenStack, and help build an vibrant ecosystem around this open source project."

Mirantis

“Today’s announcement isn’t just a big milestone for the OpenStack community, but is a milestone for the open source industry as a whole. The long-term impact of OpenStack on the entire IT industry cannot be overestimated,” said Boris Renski, Co-Founder of Mirantis and OpenStack foundation board member. “We, at Mirantis, feel privileged to be a part of this movement.”

Morphlabs

“Morphlabs has supported open source since our inception, and OpenStack closely aligns with our principles and vision of how cloud computing infrastructure should function,” said Morphlabs CEO Winston Damarillo. “It’s gratifying to see service providers’ continued adoption of the platform, and it echoes the tremendous response we’ve seen throughout the community.”

Nebula

“Nebula believes that OpenStack is key to our goal of enabling all enterprises to easily, securely and inexpensively deploy large scale private cloud computing infrastructures. We are proud to be a founding Platinum member of the OpenStack Foundation,” said Jon Mittelhauser, Nebula's VP of Engineering.

NEC

"The value of OpenStack is not only the features of the cloud computing platform, but also the openness of the OpenStack Foundation and its Open Source development community,” said Tsugikazu Shibata, Senior Manager, OSS Promotion Center, NEC Corporation. “We believe its openness will create innovation for cloud computing by sharing knowledge and experiences among the OpenStack ecosystem. We will continue to help its ecosystem grow by joining the OpenStack Foundation and leveraging our experiences."

NetApp

“The OpenStack Foundation is an important step in open source cloud computing. NetApp, as a charter member of the Foundation, is proud to continue its longstanding support of open source initiatives in the IT industry,” said Jeff O'Neal, senior director, Solutions Integration Group, NetApp. "NetApp is already contributing code into OpenStack projects, where our expertise in Service Provider-grade Data Management and Storage is accelerating adoption of the OpenStack platform. This work furthers NetApp’s commitment to helping organizations of all sizes achieve faster time-to-value in the cloud, and improve IT flexibility and efficiency for both public and private cloud deployments.”

Piston Cloud Computing

“Over the last two years the OpenStack community has grown at a pace none of us could have predicted when we started the project at NASA and Rackspace. And today the excitement surrounding OpenStack is greater than ever before,” said Josh McKenty, co-founder and CEO of Piston Cloud. “Several members of the Piston Cloud team have been involved with the OpenStack project since day one and we look forward to working with the Foundation to fulfill the OpenStack mission of becoming the ubiquitous cloud computing platform.”

Rackspace

”As a driving force behind OpenStack, Rackspace helped grow the community to where it is today, and now with the amazing support from more than 180 member companies, the Foundation is ready to take flight,” said Lew Moorman, President of Rackspace. “As a member of the board, we look forward to working with the other members to continue building OpenStack to be the de facto standard open source software for public and private clouds. We believe OpenStack and the OpenStack ecosystem is truly disrupting enterprise IT and we hear about it from our customers who are using our public and private cloud options available on OpenStack. This is an exciting time for OpenStack, and Rackspace is happy to be a large part of such a momentous movement."

Red Hat

"Today's establishment of the OpenStack Foundation is a win for open source and open cloud computing. Red Hat has been actively involved in OpenStack - the third in contributions to Essex - and has joined the Foundation as a Platinum Member to help drive the success of the technology. As the leader in open source, Red Hat is also underway in delivering the industry's only enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution incorporating Red Hat's trusted support, ecosystem and technology expertise. We look forward to continued collaboration with the OpenStack community." -- Brian Stevens, CTO and Vice President, Worldwide Engineering at Red Hat

VMware

"VMware is pleased to be able to support our customers deploying OpenStack as a member of the Foundation,” said Mathew Lodge, vice president, cloud services, VMware. “We are looking forward to building on our existing contributions to OpenStack and customer deployments of this and other open source technologies."