OpenStack launches Marketplace

Open source cloud platform OpenStack today announced the availability of its Marketplace where users can find products and services under a single portal.

There are five categories of services and applications in the OpenStack Marketplace: training, distros and appliances, public clouds, consulting and integrators, and drivers.

According to OpenStack's chief operating officer Mark Collier, the aim of the Marketplace is to help people and business get started with the cloud platform in one form or the other.

"The Marketplace is intended to help users make sense of the paths to adoption and find the right mix of products, services and community resources to achieve their goals," Collier said.

Vendors that sell products including OpenStack software must run a current version, and expose the application programming interfaces of the cloud platform. Conversely, users can rate vendor experiences in the Marketplace, and review them.

Several well-known IT companies and cloud providers have joined Marketplace. These include Hewlett-Packard, Internap, and UnitedStack in the public clouds section; EMC, Mirantis, Red Hat and IBM in the distribution and appliances section; while Dell, MetaCloud and others are offering up their cloud expertise as Consultants.

The OpenStack Marketplace builds on the success of the Training Marketplace which went live in September last year, and has since seen 250 different classes from 30 countries listed in it.