There is a lot of cognitive dissonance and speculation in the market about Dell’s announcement this week to service public cloud customers by engaging partners.
I’d like to offer up a few comments on the resulting feedback I’ve received from customers, partners and in the media to help set the record straight.
First, this in no way, affects Dell’s commitment to the OpenStack platform or community. In fact, this week we announced that we are leading the effort to enable Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V on OpenStack, a request we’ve heard from our customers and those looking to enter the OpenStack community.
Over the years, we’ve listened to our customers and learned that they are creating private clouds and want to diversify their use of public clouds. And we have developed an engineering culture that enables our customers to leverage OpenStack, even in unconventional situations, to become productive quickly and in an agile fashion. Our goal is to make our customers happy and productive, while we work to help the community thrive and grow. We are investing time and resources to that end, and will continue to invest in a strong and vibrant center of excellence for cloud innovation and development for OpenStack, and as well as private cloud solutions in general.
More generally, we have been a committed member of the OpenStack movement since it started in 2010, and have been on the forefront of delivering solutions in the space, such as the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution and the open source project, Crowbar. We are gold members of the OpenStack Foundation, and proudly have two seats on the Foundation’s Board of Directors. We also host the monthly OpenStack meetup in Austin, and have a variety of our product team engaged in various aspects of the technology and the community.
Dell absolutely believes in technology and community, and we will continue to support, innovate, and develop solutions with OpenStack going forward. Dell is 100% committed to open source, meritocracy, and OpenStack. No question about it.