The cloud market continues to evolve rapidly, with near daily announcements of new offerings, services, partnerships or pricing models. Embracing that evolution Verizon Terremark has recently invested in two open source cloud projects: the Xen Project and Cloudstack. In doing so, we are investing in technologies that allow us to bring high quality products to market, while also helping participate in the long term development of key components of the cloud service delivery platform. For Cloudstack, we are endorsing the project and actively participating in the community. With Xen, Verizon Terremark is making a monetary contribution to the development project and joining the Linux Foundation as an advisory board member. The Linux Foundation is the new home of the Xen project.
Verizon Terremark has long been supportive of open standards; however, now is the right time for us to get formally involved in the open-standard ecosystem. Our support and investment reflects our desire to see the cloud market mature quickly and provide businesses with cloud-based offerings that address specific needs like performance, cost and flexibility. From our perspective, investing in open source technologies at this stage of market development makes sense because it accelerates sharing, technology and ecosystem growth and reduces development and go-to-market costs. Here are some of the many benefits we see in supporting open standards:
- API, application and technology sharing – Open source virtualization platform capabilities and applications make it easier and faster to develop programs and reduce training and compliance costs for end users. Technology sharing leads to higher quality, more robust implementations.
- Ecosystem and market growth – Open standards allows developers to build rich systems of cooperating solutions which foster a market and encourage a higher level of adoption by businesses of all sizes as well as developers and consumers.
- Cost reductions – Standards lower the barrier to entry for new technology companies as well as service costs for established players. End users ultimately win with increased price competition and innovation.
Verizon Terremark chose to invest in Xen and Cloudstack because of our close relationship with Citrix. Citrix currently supports the Verizon Terremark portfolio of enterprise-class IT services. We believe our involvement with Xen and CloudStack will further the industry momentum around these technologies. While these are significant because they are our first active investments in open cloud projects, they will not be our last support of the open source movement. We believe that in supporting open source projects we increase the overall market acceptance of these platforms thus providing additional quality, choice and value to our customers. If the cloud market is to mature at a pace and to the level we foresee, established companies like Verizon Terremark have to embrace open standards and encourage continued ecosystem development. That step for us begins today.
