The new OpenStack Foundation is taking shape as a potentially potent force in cloud computing. Its governing board has been elected, and working groups are accelerating development in eight technical areas. Perhaps more important, it has organized itself on a self-sustaining basis and now has $ 10 million in the bank to pursue its goals.

That could have made it a more formidable competitor to VMware, which has also been active in establishing the vSphere and vCloud product portfolio adopted by many of its customers. At VMworld, outgoing CEO Paul Maritz said VMware has 8,500 service providers offering a VMware-compatible virtualization environment, many of them small co-location and regional data center operators.

An early impetus behind OpenStack was to form a broad, united front on behalf of a competitive open source cloud stack before the market was swamped by VMware, a proprietary software vendor.
Network Computing