OpenStack Board Elects Ericsson as Platinum Member of the Foundation

June 29, 2017 Off By David
Grazed from OpenStack Foundation

The Board of Directors of the OpenStack Foundation has approved Ericsson as a Platinum Member, the highest level of investment and commitment to the Foundation. With 14 live OpenStack deployments and more than 80 customers running OpenStack globally, Ericsson is investing in OpenStack as the platform for edge computing and distributed cloud.

Ericsson is powering global telecoms’ transition to 5G networks, and OpenStack has emerged as the standard technology for these next-generation networks. Heavy Reading reports that 86 percent of global telecoms name OpenStack as important to their success, and network transformation is the primary driver.

Chris Price, open source strategist in the CTO office at Ericsson, said, "OpenStack is the mainstream production technology for NFV and related technologies. With 14 live OpenStack deployments and more than 80 customers running OpenStack globally, Ericsson is taking this bigger leadership commitment to the future of OpenStack, precisely because it’s proven, powerful and poised to continue leading the software-defined future of networking."

The OpenStack Foundation Board evaluates new potential members based on their strategic commitment to OpenStack and contributions to the community, as well as diversity of company size, location and industry.

Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, said, "Ericsson has taken an active, advocacy role in collaborating with adjacent open source communities like the Open Network Automation Platform and the Open Platform for NFV. Their leadership stretches beyond the OpenStack community and embraces other technologies critical to the holistic approach for network transformation. They were a logical choice to lead at the highest level of our community."

Support for the OpenStack Foundation at the Platinum and Gold membership levels has grown steadily since the foundation formed in 2012. Platinum membership is limited to eight members, and Gold membership is limited to 24 members. In addition to Ericsson, Platinum Members are AT&T, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Rackspace, Red Hat and SUSE. There are 23 Gold Members, including 99Cloud, Aptira, Canonical, CCAT, China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Cisco, City Network, Dell EMC, Deutsche Telekom, EasyStack, FiberHome, Fujitsu, H3C, Hitachi, Inspur, inwinSTACK, Mirantis, NEC, NetApp, UnitedStack and ZTE.