
GoDaddy has finally joined OpenStack Foundation as an official Sponsor. GoDaddy’s chief technical officer Elissa Murphy and vice president of engineering Charles Beadnall are at the mast of this endeavor. This move will contribute to the expansion Openshack’s services and engineer employee base. GoDaddy are now the latest to back OpenStack bringing their support base to around 55 companies. These include Nexus, Oracle, A10 and TE Corp as well as various Gold and Platinum sponsors such as AT&T, IBM and HP.
Rumors of the backing have been around for a few months now when a job opening was advertised by GoDaddy for ‘OpenStack Cloud Serving Engineering Director’ on linkedin.
Murphy said, “GoDaddy is continuing to shift business operations to the cloud and using open source platforms to do it. With the launch of the GoDaddy cloud platform, we’re making significant progress in building a powerful and unified platform for our small business customers.. By sponsoring the OpenStack Foundation, we’re making a strategic move toward building GoDaddy’s cloud platform services. We plan to continue to contribute to the code base and use it as our own cloud infrastructure, as well,”
Only time will tell what this backing will do for GoDaddy’s services overall and their overall growth towards becoming cloud giants.
Arne Josefsberg, Executive Vice President at GoDaddy said “GoDaddy is already at a disadvantage because it isn’t able to match the infrastructure footprint of industry giants like Amazon, and therefore can’t achieve the same scale, despite its ability to offer more value-added services in the local underserved markets it’s targeting…This is where cloud federation could provide a leg up.”