Today our CEO Jane Silber announced at the OpenStack Conference in Boston that HP has chosen Ubuntu as one of the initial lead host and guest operating system powering their Public Cloud. HP and Canonical are working closely together during the current private beta to make certain that we provide the most secure, scalable, business-class cloud to companies of all sizes.

We are excited to join with HP in recognizing that open and interoperable cloud infrastructure and services are critical in delivering the next generation of cloud-based services to developers, ISVs and businesses. Both companies share a common commitment to open source and both embrace the OpenStack community. With over 117 member companies the momentum behind OpenStack is truly game changing and promises to position it at the center of the next wave of computing.

This is an important announcement on several fronts – that OpenStack is seen as the platform of choice for building out the largest Public Clouds, and that Ubuntu has what it takes to power OpenStack clouds as a scalable and hardened host OS and responsive and flexible guest OS.

Ubuntu is the reference OS for OpenStack but like in any other open source project we need to earn our keep on a daily basis and having HP select us is a positive reflection of Ubuntu as a Cloud OS.