The Board of Directors of the OpenStack Foundation approved four members of the OpenStack community as the newest Gold Members of the Foundation, supporting strategic opportunities in public cloud, telecom networks and the Chinese market. The decision was made during the Foundation Board¹s meeting at the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona. The new members are City Network and Deutsche Telekom in Europe, and 99Cloud and China Mobile in China.
Europe and China are fast-growing markets for OpenStack, the most widely deployed open source software for building clouds. Both markets are growing faster than the U.S., supported by healthy startup communities, large vendor support and a growing network of regional OpenStack Day events at which users and developers gather to exchange best practices and hear from operators of clouds based on OpenStack.
Until recently, growth in OpenStack deployments was chiefly found in the private cloud market, including 99Cloud Inc., which is focused on providing enterprise-level solutions and deploys private cloud in different industries with tailor-made vertical templates in China, including financial services, government and power. The addition of other three Gold Members highlights the emergence of OpenStack-powered public clouds in non-U.S. markets. Public cloud has emerged as a growth driver for OpenStack in Europe and APAC due to factors such as data sovereignty and local/regional presence of data centers.
The two telecoms‹China Mobile and Deutsche Telekom‹join a growing list of telecoms and operators of large networks who are using OpenStack not only to build public and private clouds but also to take advantage of the strong set of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) capabilities and ecosystem support that OpenStack offers.
About the Newest Gold Members
99Cloud – 99Cloud Inc. is China’s leading professional OpenStack service provider to enterprises. 99Cloud is one of the first corporate members of the OpenStack Foundation and is ranked in the top 10 in OpenStack Community code contribution worldwide. Additionally, it ranks in the top 10 worldwide in contributions to Horizon, Murano, Tacker, Kolla, Senlin, Sahara, Trove and Freezer. 99Cloud is the sponsor and organiser of Trystack.cn, the largest OpenStack community in China and is also China’s largest professional OpenStack training institution. 99Cloud Inc. has been approved as one of the first official training partners of the OpenStack Foundation¹s COA certification worldwide.
China Mobile – China Mobile is the leading telecommunications services provider in China and boasts the world’s largest mobile network.The company operates one of the world’s largest OpenStack public cloud platforms and is building a new, larger private cloud based on OpenStack over multiple locations. China Mobile is focusing on 5G networks, NFV, IoT and cloud computing and has chosen OpenStack as a fundamental platform for NFV and IoT applications. China Mobile is becoming an OpenStack leader through standardisation and industrialisation.
City Network – City Network is a leading provider of infrastructure services in Europe. The company provides public, private and hybrid cloud solutions based on OpenStack from 27 data centers around the world. Its IaaS and global networks make it easy to build solutions that fully exploit the capabilities of OpenStack over multiple locations. Through its industry-specific IaaS, City Network can ensure that customers can comply with demands originating from specific laws and regulations concerning auditing, reputability, data handling and data security such as Basel and Solvency. With the most data centers and features in Europe, and global reach via nodes in APAC and North America, it allows for ease of use while offering complete redundancy and data integrity.
Deutsche Telekom – Deutsche Telekom is one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies, with more than 156 million mobile customers, 29 million fixed-network lines and around 18 million broadband lines. Deutsche Telekom has announced improvements to its Open Telekom Cloud, first announced at Cebit 2016. At the OpenStack forum in Germany, Deutsche Telekom’s business customer division announced further enhancements in Open Telekom Cloud, its public cloud offering, launched in March 2016 at Cebit. Open Telekom Cloud is based on OpenStack and is the company¹s first public cloud offering running on OpenStack. Deutsche Telekom chose OpenStack in order to keep further development and integration as simple and “open” as possible.
Foundation membership is limited to 24 Gold Members, who vote annually to select eight Board Directors representing the class. In addition to the four new members elected in Barcelona, Gold members are Aptira, CCAT, Cisco, Dell, DellEMC, DreamHost, EasyStack, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Huawei, inwinSTACK, Juniper Networks, Mirantis, NEC, NetApp, Symantec, UnitedStack and Virtuozzo.
These new Gold Members highlight the ongoing growth and exciting new use cases for OpenStack software, said Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation. Europe, APAC, public cloud and telecom each are proof points that OpenStack is attracting new users and new workloads at a quickening pace. We’re looking forward to what the community can learn from these contributors to our project.
One of our team is live tweeting from OpenStack Summit Barcelona – @MrDavidOrgan