The OpenStack Foundation has elected its top executives and neither of them are from OpenStack founding company Rackspace. Alan Clark, director of industry initiatives, emerging standards and open source for SUSE is chairman. And Lew Tucker, Cisco’sVP and CTO of cloud is vice chairman, according to attendees of Tuesday afternoon’s meeting.
The fact that the two top dogs are from SUSE and Cisco and not Rackspace, which has been the driving force behind the pre-foundation OpenStack, is key. Last year, some OpenStack proponents bridled at what they saw as Rackspace’s control of the open source cloud effort, only joining after Rackspace started to move the work to a more independent foundation model.
Tucker is well known to GigaOM readers, having long been a presence at our Structure conferences. He was CTO and VP of cloud computing at Sun Microsystems’ before becoming CTO of Cisco’s cloud efforts two years ago.
After choosing its leaders, there’s still a lot on the foundation agenda — including sorting out which of the executives from Rackspace, and other companies driving the effort will end up working at the foundation itself and which will stay with their companies.
And, it still has to weigh the applications of VMware, Intel and NEC to join as gold members. Foundation Executive Director Jonathan Bryce said that will happen at an upcoming meeting, the date of which is to be determined.
