Cisco signed up this week to become one of 50+ partners now contributing to OpenStack. There might be significance to this to telecoms, as Cisco is so germane to the industry in terms of the servers, routing and switching infrastructure it provides to enable cloud deployments in the telecom space. Cisco’s growing support of open source could mean good things for telecom service providers increasingly getting into cloud computing.
With Cisco’s buy-in, it becomes more likely telecom service providers can leverage the flexibility and economics of open-source cloud platforms. With someone like Lew Tucker (formerly of Sun Microsystems) at the helm as Cisco’s CTO for Cloud Computing, the enthusiasm for open source could help drive a central shift in IT to the cloud. Few companies have Cisco’s level of influence to drive that shift in the telecom industry, but with Cisco incorporation of open source into its equipment used for cloud computing deployments, it will have the influence to drive standards not only in its own products, but that of its growing partner base.
As written last week in Connected Planet, it will be interesting to see to what extent open source will be important to communications service providers getting into massively complex cloud environments.
But with Cisco’s participation in the OpenStack open-source cloud coalition, not to mention its partnership with Red Hat (and interest in the Deltacloud project), and contributions to Fedora, it is obvious Cisco wants to be a major influence in open-source communities. As it works to expand deployments of cloud computing infrastructure—and hence purchases of its equipment in support of cloud computing deployments—it may become easier for telecom service providers to achieve economies of scale using open source in their cloud deployment strategies.