Curious Insights on OpenStack Foundation Members

Many of those who follow OpenStack know that a pre-requisite for doing virtually anything in the community, from attending the summit to voting for the foundation board, is membership in the OpenStack Foundation. Anyone can become a member by filling out a simple web form and sharing a few words about their interest in OpenStack. Since launch, the foundation has amassed almost 17,000 such members from 3400 companies.

Unfortunately, the interface for browsing member information on openstack.org is fairly limited and does not allow one to browse membership information in any useful way. To address this, we added a members directory to Stackalytics, making it possible for anyone to drill down into the foundation membership information via an intuitive interface.

Having spent a little time playing with it, here are some curious facts that this information reveals:

• HP has the most foundation members out of all companies participating in OpenStack. This is not surprising, given HP’s commitment to the community and the fact that the company has also recently dethroned Red Hat, becoming the #1 code contributor to the project.

• Using the number of registered foundation members, it is possible to approximate therelative size of different OpenStack start-ups. It is easy to argue that this is not an accurate metric, but the picture generally jives with my subjective gut feel and is worth sharing.

• Dell is the third largest company in the foundation by member count. Incidentally, virtually all foundation members from Dell joined in August of 2012. Less than 100 new members joined from Dell since August 2012…

• Traditional offshoring providers are starting to take notice of OpenStack, rolling out services and staff augmentation practices to help OpenStack adopters bridge the talent gap. Here is how some of them stack up by member count in OpenStack foundation:

• Here is how the top ten organizations by stack up by foundation member count. Curious to see that VMware and EMC combined have almost as many employees registered as foundation members as Red Hat.