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In 2012 China vowed 'OpenStack will smash the monopoly of western cloud providers!'

And in 2017 Huawei replaced HPE as a Platinum Member of OpenStack Foundation

Tristan Goode recalls that at the first OpenStack conference in China, in 2012, the deputy director of nation's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology Software and Integrated Circuit Promotion opened his speech by saying “OpenStack will smash the monopoly of the western cloud providers!”

And as if to prove the point made that day by Dr. Liu Ming, holder of the offices mentioned above, Huawei's just been elected as a Platinum member of the OpenStack Foundation. Fellow Chinese vendor H3C has become a Gold Member.

Goode has since served on the Foundation's board and is also CEO of OpenStack consultancy Aptira, and welcomed Huawei's appointment as one of just eight Platinum members. Members with that status are required to dedicate full-time resources toward the project, contribute funds and hold a seat on the OpenStack Board.

Intriguingly, Huawei has replaced HPE.

“There's an obvious trend to use OpenStack in China, especially in telcos.” Goode told The Register. He also sees upside in Huawei becoming a Platinum member because the company is the first Asian entity to achieve the status and “seems serious about growing the thing.”

Gartner research director Michael Warrilow also says Huawei's new status is warranted. "They deserve it," he told The Register. "They've been one of the top contributors."

H3C, the China-based networking company spawned by pre-split HP and 3Com, is now a gold member and therefore has an obligation to contribute funds.

It's not hard to see why Huawei sought and won Platinum status: its FusionSphere and FusionSphere Cloud rest on OpenStack. The company has also decided its enterprise business will boom, an ambition China's government will do its best to realise with friendly purchasing policies.

Or as Zheng Yelai, president of the IT Product Line at Huawei puts it in the canned announcement: Our goal is to make OpenStack a huge success, and to build the OpenStack that truly brings value to our customers.”

And HPE? We know its killed its Helion OpenStack cloud and pledged its public cloud future to Microsoft, as an Azure-first cloud partner and day one supplier of Azure Stack boxen.

We also know that Cisco has killed off its "Intercloud" OpenStack public cloud effort, and that Azure, AWS, Google and Bluemix all have data centres in China. So perhaps OpenStack hasn't quite managed to “smash the monopoly of the western cloud providers” just yet. But who would bet against Huawei doing very, very well with it? ®

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