CF Summit Video: Swisscom Discusses Using Cloud Foundry and OpenStack/Piston To Build Future Cloud Platform

July 30, 2014 Adam Bloom

featured-CF-SwisscomSwisscom is using Cloud Foundry and OpenStack to build its future cloud platform.

The company, based in Switzerland, provides telecommunications services to 6.4 million mobile customers, 1 million TV subscribers, and 2 million retail broadband accounts.

At the recent Cloud Foundry Summit, there was a business track breakout session—a panel with Torsten Boettjer, CEO at Swisscom, Joshua McKenty, Co-Founder and CTO at Piston Cloud Computing, and James Watters, VP of Product, Marketing, and Ecosystem for Cloud Foundry at Pivotal.

The session, available on demand, covered Swisscom’s experience working with both open source cloud platforms, collaboratively.

Why Put these Two Together? Agile and Collaborative—Cloud Foundry and OpenStack

In a strategic effort to become more efficient and agile, Swisscom decided to build a new, cloud-based IT infrastructure that would deliver a foundation for end user services. In order to achieve their goal, the company saw how the two platforms complemented each other and could act as a set of core components, orchestrating and automating cloud virtualization and runtimes.

Watters posed the first question on this topic, “Cloud Foundry and OpenStack are part of core of Swisscom’s cloud strategy, and how do these work together?” Highlights of Boettjer’s answers include:

  • Both are open source.
  • Being in Switzerland, Swisscom needed to enable an ecosystem. The future is not about buying infrastructure and sticking it a data center. We are offering our customers more in terms of hardware, software, and access management.
  • Basically, we needed to provide value added services, standardized IT solutions, and ultimately target the end user as a consumer so that we can give the CFO a different way to buy IT services and truly enhance personal productivity versus focusing on the infrastructure and missing the mark on supporting end-user requirements.

Video Highlights—Cloud Foundry, Open Stack, and Piston Cloud Computing

To see the entire video, watch “Swisscom, PistonCloud, Pivotal – Delivering Cutting Edge Technology with Swiss Bank Level Security” on our Youtube channel.

Watters navigates the conversation to also cover lessons learned and developing unique competencies.

He dives into the depth of OpenStack and Cloud Foundry with the Founder and CTO of Piston Cloud Computing, Joshua McKenty. If you don’t know him by name, McKenty was the Technical Architect of NASA’s Nebula Cloud Computing Platform and the OpenStack compute components. He is also a board member of the OpenStack Foundation and was the team lead for the development of the Netscape Browser v8.

The talk is full of great insights for anyone looking at running these two platforms together.

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