Back in April, VMware then CEO Paul Maritz considered OpenStack as a considerable competitor in the cloud with regards to infrastructure and management.  So news of VMware joining OpenStack came as a surprise.  But was it really that surprising?

First off, let’s look at what OpenStack is all about.  According to SiliconANGLE’s Tavis J. Hampton, OpenStack “is a collection or “stack” of open source tools designed to serve as the basis for cloud platform deployment.”  Compared to VMware’s cloud products, “it is not a packaged cloud suite ready to sell and deploy.”  Vendors use OpenStack to “integrate it into their own commercial products and offer sales and support to their customers.”  So in a sense, OpenStack is not a direct competitor of VMware but their clients are.

You see, when OpenStack is fully prepared for their commercial implementation, companies signed up with them will be able to deploy cloud platforms using KVM and Xen virtualization in large numbers.  So what VMware’s announcement of joining OpenStack really means is that it recognized the fact that their “hypervisor technology is no longer the only player in the game” and that they need OpenStack in the future to be able to compete with various players.

And VMware isn’t the only who sees the benefit of signing up for OpenStack.

SUSE Cloud, a platform for automatic administration of clouds that enables companies to optimize the use of resources and accelerate service delivery in administering and provisioning workloads seamlessly in a secure cloud environment, officially chose the OpenStack cloud distribution path for private cloud solutions.  SUSE will use OpenStack as the foundation of their SUSE Cloud platform so that they can meet the needs of their customers and to be able to capitalize on the broad industry support and the dynamism of the OpenStack community.

But others are going the other route, as in competing directly with OpenStack.  Basho, the makers of Riak distributed database, is integrating their Amazon Simple Storage System compatible product RiakCS with Apache CloudStack, an open source private cloud system backed by Citrix.  But to be clear, they are not abandoning OpenStack, nor is RiakCS becoming a dedicated part of CloudStack.  Basho CTO Justin Sheehy explains that this is just an integration wherein CloudStack users can use RiakCS as a storage layer with a single authentication system without having to build custom integrations and Citrix and Basho will jointly market the combined solution.