IBM has announced that it is a Premier-level sponsor for OpenStack Summit, which will be held May 12-16, at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. The OpenStack Summit is the premier open cloud event, bringing together thousands of OpenStack contributors, users and ecosystem members.

IBM's ongoing relationship with open standards organizations such as OpenStack reflects the company's long history of supporting open standards and open source initiatives. IBM's support of OpenStack and the OpenStack Summit is driven by its goal of helping companies develop and adopt open cloud computing platforms. In fact, IBM recently announced that it is investing more than $1 billion in an open standards based Platform-as-a-Service based on Openstack and Cloud Foundry.

"IBM strongly believes that fostering an industry-wide, open cloud architecture and simplifying how applications are built and deployed are vital to broader adoption of cloud computing," said Dr. Angel Diaz, IBM's Vice President of Open Technology and Cloud Performance Solutions. "As a Platinum member of OpenStack and now a Premier sponsor of the Summit, IBM will continue to play an active role driving widespread adoption of cloud technologies based on open standards to enable interoperability and avoid vendor lock-in." 

As one of the top contributors to OpenStack, IBM continues to play a significant role in OpenStack releases, dedicating more than 330 IBM resources, including community facing development resources; integrating OpenStack into IBM offerings; resources working on customer engagements, and marketing activities.

IBM also recently announced that it is accelerating the adoption of cloud computing and that it is working with key open technology organizations that are focused on simplifying and speeding application deployment on the cloud. Specifically, IBM was just named as a founding member of jQuery, home to a JavaScript community committed to simplifying coding tasks. Additionally, IBM will join Pivotal and a number of other companies to establish the Cloud Foundry to help drive global collaboration with developers and cloud computing technologists. In doing so, they will seek to produce a ubiquitous Platform-as-a-Service open source cloud computing platform for hybrid clouds.