IBM became an OpenStack Platinum member and said it will conduct a cloud strategy based on this

So far, IBM has become a platinum member of OpenStack, a cloud operating system platform, IBM spokesman said the open source code from this project will be the foundation of our future cloud strategy.

At the Pulse conference in Las Vegas, IBM unveiled SmartCloud Orchestrator, a service that helps customers provision compute, storage and networking resources for applications running on the company's SmartCloud platform.

Robert LeBlanc, IBM senior vice president of middleware software, said there's plenty of discussion about the debate between public and private clouds, but he believes users will be more likely to use a hybrid approach to both. He said open source tools such as OpenStack are key to supporting a common platform across public and private clouds, which is why the company plans to fully support OpenStack in its products and services.

This may also be a problem: IBM's cloud strategy is based on SmartCloud, which offers paid public cloud offerings, provides customers with components to set up private clouds or use dedicated hosting infrastructures, and even includes PaaS, product. IBM opened SmartCloud two and a half years before OpenStack appeared, so LeBlanc said SmartCloud is not running on OpenStack at this point, so in the future? "We're still exploring," LeBlanc said. OpenStack to SmartCloud platform, said, "but we think this is a necessary step."

IBM's SmartCloud Orchestration, introduced today, is built on OpenStack and provides users with a simple graphical user interface for deploying, managing, and automating the shipping of resources, and it allows users to automate applications that run in the cloud. It also provides a self service portal.

Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Cisco, Red Hat and Rackspace are also rolling out plans for the OpenStack project. Josh McKenty, who helped develop the computing part of OpenStack, welcomes IBM to join the project, but he said he will wait to see how far the company will integrate OpenStack into its products and services, especially the broader SmartCloud platform. "IBM's membership is significant for OpenStack," said McKenty, who is currently chief technology officer at Piston Cloud Computing and is not yet clear how IBM will integrate OpenStack into its platform in the future.

I believe there will be more news about OpenStack emerging in the next few months as the new OpenStack code, released twice a year, will be released next month. Proponents of the project are also ready to participate in the next developer and user conference, during which time many of the companies that support OpenStack are also expected to launch their OpenStack strategy.