IBM News Release:

IBM to be Premier Sponsor of OpenStack Summit

Reinforcing IBM’s commitment to open cloud architectures to drive wide-spread adoption of cloud technologies

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ARMONK, N.Y. - 17 Mar 2014: IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced that it is a Premier-level sponsor for OpenStack Summit, which will be held May 12-16, at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. The OpenStack Summit is the premier open cloud event, bringing together thousands of OpenStack contributors, users and ecosystem members.

IBM’s ongoing relationship with open standards organizations such as OpenStack reflects the company’s long history of supporting open standards and open source initiatives. IBM’s support of OpenStack and the OpenStack Summit is driven by its goal of helping companies develop and adopt open cloud computing platforms. In fact, IBM recently announced that it is investing more than $1 billion in an open standards based Platform-as-a-Service based on Openstack and Cloud Foundry. 

“IBM strongly believes that fostering an industry-wide, open cloud architecture and simplifying how applications are built and deployed are vital to broader adoption of cloud computing,” said Dr. Angel Diaz, IBM's Vice President of Open Technology and Cloud Performance Solutions. “As a Platinum member of OpenStack and now a Premier sponsor of the Summit, IBM will continue to play an active role driving widespread adoption of cloud technologies based on open standards to enable interoperability and avoid vendor lock-in.”  

As one of the top contributors to OpenStack, IBM continues to play a significant role in OpenStack releases, dedicating more than 330 IBM resources, including community facing development resources; integrating OpenStack into IBM offerings; resources working on customer engagements, and marketing activities.  

IBM also recently announced that it is accelerating the adoption of cloud computing and that it is working with key open technology organizations that are focused on simplifying and speeding application deployment on the cloud. Specifically, IBM was just named as a founding member of jQuery, home to a JavaScript community committed to simplifying coding tasks. Additionally, IBM will join Pivotal and a number of other companies to establish the Cloud Foundry to help drive global collaboration with developers and cloud computing technologists. In doing so, they will seek to produce a ubiquitous Platform-as-a-Service open source cloud computing platform for hybrid clouds. 

About IBM Cloud Computing IBM is the global leader in cloud with an unmatched portfolio of open cloud solutions that help clients to think, build or tap into it. No other company has the ability to bring together unique industry knowledge and unmatched cloud capabilities, that have already helped more than 30,000 clients around the world. Today, IBM has more than 100 cloud SaaS solutions, thousands of experts with deep industry knowledge helping clients transform and a network of 40 new centers worldwide global cloud delivery centers.

Since 2007, IBM has invested more than $7 billion in 17 acquisitions to accelerate its cloud initiatives and build a high value cloud portfolio. IBM holds 1,560 cloud patents focused on driving innovation. In fact, IBM for the 21st consecutive year topped the annual list of US patent leaders. IBM processes more the 5.5M client transactions daily through IBM's public cloud. Since its acquisition in 2013, IBM SoftLayer has served 3,500 new cloud clients. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/smartcloud. Follow us on Twitter at @IBMcloud and on our blog at http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com. Join the conversation #ibmcloud.