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Open-Xchange is glad to announce that it is joining the Open Cloud Foundation, the new global industry body that brings together cloud solution providers, customer organizations and researchers to actively promote open standards and ensure freedom of choice in the cloud.
The Open Cloud Foundation, officially launched on April 26 in Brussels, brings together a unique global group of organizations in the cloud ecosystem, including associations such as CISPE (Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe), The Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2coalition), ISPConnect and The OpenStack Foundation, and companies like OVH, La Poste, NetApp.
All these players, including Open-Xchange, joined forces driven by the idea that the cloud should be an open and competitive environment, where providers strive to offer the best possible service under fair conditions, while users are free to choose and change their suppliers.
Cloud infrastructures, platforms and applications are nowadays almost a requirement for scalable, reliable and manageable online products and services; more and more companies build their own fortunes over someone else's networks and computers.
The lack of interoperability and portability in the cloud can significantly hinder the development of online companies, as they could be locked inside the proprietary formats and interfaces and inside the commercial offers and pricing schemes of a single dominant vendor, without a simple way out to move their business to a competing supplier. Also, as services are built over multiple cloud offers by multiple providers, standardization, interoperation and best practices are necessary to avoid hidden costs, security risks and unexpected reliability issues.
Open-Xchange and the other participants to the Open Cloud Foundation are willing to commit to shared standards on how to do business in the cloud, ensuring that their customers can build a relationship which is based on loyalty and reciprocal advantage, saving them the hustle of switching to a different supplier. Open-Xchange already applies these concepts to its OX-as-a-service offering, that allows ISPs to acquire a turnkey, fully managed cloud solution for their consumer email platform, getting rid of scalability and operational issues.
This is just a natural commitment for a leading open source company like Open-Xchange, that has made transparency and openness key values for its philosophy, and key drivers of its growth. This is why Open-Xchange decided to support the endeavour of the Open Cloud Foundation since day one, as a contribution to a successful and fair cloud services market.
