Salesforce may reportedly join the OpenStack Cloud community

By Darshik Jariwala - December, 19th 2013

Salesforce, who recently wrapped up this years Dreamforce in November, is reportedly joining the famous open source project, OpenStack, says Graham Weston, chairman and co-founder of Rackspace Hosting Inc, and one of OpenStack’s strong promoter.

If Salesforce does eventually decide to join the project, OpenStack will have added another valuable name to its list of supporters which includes the likes of HP, Dell, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Red Hat, Oracle, EMC, VMWare, Yahoo and many more. As of now, OpenStack boasts of more 200 such names in the list of their supporters. According to its website (at the time of writing this post), OpenStack today spans accross 132 countries and 13368 cloud experts contributing towards the project.

Salesforce’s inclusion in the project is regarded as an important news, since they are now one of the major Software as a Service (SaaS) companies. The reason being, the customers cannot change their cloud vendor as applications created and provided by them would not work if the customer changed the vendor. However, joining OpenStack may solve this problem owing to its open source nature which would allow the applications to be transferred to any cloud vendor who uses OpenStack. Its should be noted that Salesforce has declined to comment on this matter when WSJ (where this story first appeared) asked them, they simply replied saying it does not “comment on rumors or speculations”.

About OpenStack

OpenStack is a joint initiative by NASA and Rackspace Hosting, launched in 2010. Developers and Technologists from around the the world worked together in order to develop OpenStack, meant to serve as an open source cloud computing platform for public and private cloud by providing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

OpenStack is licensed under Apache 2.0, and its main goal is to provide interoperability between different cloud services. It has modular architecture consisting 3 main components; Compute, Networking and Storage. OpenStack project is now managed by OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit organization established in 2012.

Source – WSJ

Photo Credit – Aaron Hockley/Flickr