Deutsche Telekom has joined the Top 30 group of OpenStack sponsors. In the run-up to the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, the public cloud provider successfully applied for a higher ranking of its commitment to the community.

As well as Deutsche Telekom, China Mobile, City Network, and 99 Cloud also successfully passed the admission process to become Gold Members. Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation, sees the four new Gold Members’ appointments as a recognition of the importance of OpenStack in Europe and Asia. “Public clouds have quickly proved to be a fast-growing area and Deutsche Telekom’s commitment is an important reason for this,” Collier remarks. “The choice of Gold Membership gives the community access to a strong partner in the fast-growing telecom field. We are delighted with Deutsche Telekom’s continued commitment to the OpenStack project.”

“By applying for Gold Membership, we’re taking the next logical step to intensify our commitment to OpenStack,” explains Kurt Garloff, the architect of the Open Telekom Cloud. “The high ranking is recognition by the OpenStack Board not only of our intention to be involved in OpenStack’s further development but also our contribution to the community over the years.”

Research shows that potential public cloud users are not only concerned with security and compliance issues but that potential vendor lock-in is a major issue. Customers expect much more than just being able to move applications and services between various providers. As an open standard, OpenStack ensures this freedom of choice and technical independence from any particular cloud platform.

“On the one hand, we see our role in the OpenStack community as a mouthpiece for users and on the other as a provider of one of Europe’s biggest public clouds. We will bring our business experience as well as customer feedback to the further development of OpenStack,” says Clemens Hardewig, VP Delivery Open Telekom Cloud.

The cornerstone of the OpenStack Summit is the InterOp Challenge. Here, Deutsche Telekom together with 15 other clouds gave a live demonstration of how the same application could be rolled out automatically with the same Ansible Playbooks on the cloud providers’ various OpenStack environments.

Deutsche Telekom was represented at the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona by various employees, a keynote, and in further sessions. Some Telekom trainees were also in Barcelona and presented their OpenStack RefCard with the theme of “Cloud Kindergarten” – watch the video here.

Before achieving Gold Membership, Deutsche Telekom was listed as provider on the OpenStack marketplace, thanks to a successful DefCore certification.

More information on the OpenStack Summit can be found on the event’s official webpage.