Breaking News: IBM Joins OpenStack

Image via CrunchBase

For a long time I was wondering why IBM is not making the OpenStack (previous CloudAve coverage) play because, if the past is any indication, IBM knows how to effectively leverage open source projects while also contributing heavily to them. They have done it with many open source projects including Linux, OpenOffice, etc.. In fact, I have been pushing many of the IBMers on why they haven’t embraced OpenStack for sometime now. I never got a straight answer. Well, I never got an answer.

Today when I was casually browsing the corporate contributor wiki page on the OpenStack website, I noticed that IBM has quietly joined OpenStack (sometime in early February, 2012)

I am very surprised that neither IBM not OpenStack made any announcement in this regard. In fact, this is strange knowing how much good karma mileage IBM can get by their association with OpenStack project and how much legitimacy OpenStack can get by having IBM on their fold. While I will let the concerned parties explain the silence, let me unabashedly claim how happy I am with IBM entering the fold. I think IBM’s entry into the OpenStack fold has further legitimized OpenStack as a solid cloud contender even though there are still murmurs about its reliability on the compute side. It is just a matter of time they sort it out and make both compute and storage production ready (if you ask people like Randy Bias, he will say how OpenStack is already being used in production). Overall, this is a big move for IBM and kudos to OpenStack for this addition.