During the opening keynote at the OpenStack Summit, I demonstrated our X1 cloud-based service in a production environment powered by OpenStack. The objective was to show how Comcast is using cloud applications and cloud infrastructure to power customer-facing applications and services. This demonstration also showed the next step in the ongoing strategic collaboration between Comcast and Cisco, who has been helping us build our private OpenStack cloud.

We are deploying OpenStack throughout our infrastructure to support large-scale, media-rich, consumer-facing applications. Several early applications targeted to the OpenStack infrastructure power our new X1 Platform. The X1 platform delivers a more personalized TV experience designed to make it easier for consumers to find the content they love. We expect to deploy X1 to the majority of our markets in 2013, and the OpenStack infrastructure will play an important role in scaling up these services.

The OpenStack community is vibrant and diverse with over 500 contributors to the latest version of its open source software . We think that diversity brings tremendous value to the user community and accelerates the pace of innovation on this platform. Comcast and Cisco plan to contribute much of our OpenStack work back to the community to further enhance OpenStack as a highly scalable, reliable, and cost effective infrastructure platform for service providers, and we’re excited by the potential this platform brings to our businesses.