The Open Infrastructure (OpenInfra) Foundation today announced five inaugural members of its new Associate Member category. Boston University, CERN, Open Source Business Alliance - Federal Association for Digital Sovereignty, OW2 and SODA Foundation form the initial group of Associate Members. This new category of Foundation members was added by the OpenInfra Foundation board to recognize and collaborate more closely with academic and public research institutions and non-profit organizations that use, build or sustain open infrastructure. Check out the full list of participating organizations and learn how your organization can join to support the global OpenInfra community.

Boston University works closely with the OpenInfra Foundation via the OpenInfra Labs project, and has recently announced the Open Research Cloud Initiative. Participating as an Associate Member in the OpenInfra Foundation is a natural step by which Boston University will strengthen its collaboration with the Foundation and deepen its investment in open-source-powered infrastructure. 

“The Open Research Cloud Initiative brings researchers and open source developers together to develop open source systems at scale, and provides a rapid path for integration of research ideas into upstream software and production ,” said Michael Daitzman, Director of Product Development for the Mass Open Cloud (MOC), a collaborative project hosted at the Boston University Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering . “Boston University’s membership in the OpenInfra Foundation will enable the innovation that comes from close interaction between academic researchers, developers in the open source community, and operators of production cloud services..”

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world's largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Physicists and engineers at CERN use the world's largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter and understand the fundamental structure and origins of the universe. 

“CERN has been contributing to the Open Infrastructure community since 2013 and sharing our experiences with running large scale computing services”, said Tim Bell, Compute and Monitoring group leader, CERN IT department. “We have greatly appreciated collaborating with other members of the community as we look to address the extreme computing challenges of the LHC programme."  

Open Source Business Alliance - Federal Association for Digital Sovereignty is a German industry association working to establish open source as the standard in public procurement, in research and business development. It hosts the Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) project, a manufacturer-independent, free, federatable cloud stack built with the Gaia-X cloud framework in mind.

"The SCS project is an important contribution to digital sovereignty" said Peter Ganten, Chair of the OSB Alliance. “It is built on top of great existing, proven open source technologies, many of which are developed by the great communities supported and hosted by the Open Infrastructure Foundation. Therefore, we are delighted to formalize our partnership with the Open Infrastructure Foundation. Together, we will continue to work closely to help open source projects collaborate and jointly build standards for an open infrastructure that enables digital sovereignty.” 

The mission of OW2 is to promote a code base of open source software for corporate information systems, including middleware, generic business applications and cloud computing platforms. It’s been a long-term partner of the Open Infrastructure Foundation, and the Associate membership confirms this engagement to build the next decade of open infrastructure together.

“OW2 and the Open Infrastructure Foundation share the same vision and passion for openness in software development. It is with great pleasure that we join the Foundation’s inaugural class of Associate Members” said Cedric Thomas, CEO of OW2. “We look forward to leveraging our friendly relationship through joint initiatives working hand in hand to deliver professional and market-ready open source software and facilitate its mainstream adoption by corporate decision makers.”

The SODA Foundation, previously OpenSDS, hosts the SODA Open Data Framework for data mobility from edge to core to cloud. The SODA Foundation is part of the Linux Foundation and includes both open source software and standards to support the increasing need for data autonomy. 

"Growing an open ecosystem for data and storage with industry partners is imperative to SODA Foundation,” said Steven Tan, chairman, SODA Foundation and VP & CTO of Cloud Solutions at Futurewei. “Joining OpenInfra Foundation strengthens our open ecosystem commitment, and allows us to work closely on projects, marketing, and other efforts to advance open data & storage infrastructure together." 

“We can’t build the next decade of open source-powered infrastructure in isolation. Collaboration among adjacent communities working on open infrastructure is essential to delivering integrated solutions that can be safely deployed in production,” said Thierry Carrez, vice president of engineering at the OpenInfra Foundation. “The innovative data storage solutions developed at SODA Foundation, the alignment of missions with OW2, and the focus on the role of open source in digital sovereignty at OSB Alliance are important components of this landscape. We also wanted to recognize our long-standing collaboration with CERN on OpenStack and BU on OpenInfra Labs. We could not have selected more ideal Associate Members for our inaugural class, as the group touches on each of the major themes we seek to advance through this new membership category.”

Check out the full list of participating organizations and learn how your organization can join to support the global OpenInfra community.