EMC follows VMware, rest of world into OpenStack
EMC has joined the OpenStack open-source cloud effort. The news hits three months after VMware — 80 percent owned by EMC — signaled its intention to back the initiative. EMC joins as a corporate-level member while VMware is a higher-level gold member.
Context & Ripple Effects
EMC's move completes a family affair: three months after VMware signaled it would back OpenStack, its 80 percent owner has followed with a corporate-level membership of its own — one tier below VMware's gold status. The staggered entry suggests the two companies calibrated their public commitment separately even though they answer to the same parent.
For EMC this is consistent with a decade-long drift toward cloud services, including its 2009 acquisition of cloud support vendor FastScale. Joining OpenStack puts the storage giant inside the project whose success would commoditize parts of the virtualization stack VMware monetizes.
First-order effects
- EMC gains a seat in the OpenStack effort at the corporate level, letting it shape the platform its storage arrays will increasingly be asked to plug into by enterprise customers building private clouds.
Second-order effects
- The odd structure of a parent joining at a lower tier than its own subsidiary will pressure EMC and VMware to clarify how they divide OpenStack strategy versus VMware's proprietary vSphere business — and gives rival storage vendors an opening to court OpenStack deployments without EMC's baggage.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — infrastructure incumbents joining rather than fighting open-source cloud platforms — competition shifts from owning the cloud operating layer to selling hardware, storage, and services on top of a shared stack, eroding the premium VMware-style lock-in commands.
The trend: Legacy infrastructure vendors are converging on OpenStack as table stakes, trading attempts to block open cloud software for paid positions inside it.