The
Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) announced today that Alibaba
Group, the world’s largest online and mobile commerce
company, has joined as a Platinum member. OCP was initiated by Facebook
in 2011 with a mission to apply the benefits of open source to hardware
and rapidly increase the pace of innovation in, near and around the data
center and beyond. Since then, OCP has been consistently innovating
around open source contributions for networking, servers, storage and
Open Rack.

Established
in 1999, Alibaba Group’s mission is to make it easy to do business
anywhere. The company aims to build the future infrastructure of
commerce. Alibaba Cloud, the Group’s cloud computing arm, develops
highly scalable platforms for cloud computing and data management. It
provides a comprehensive suite of cloud computing services to support
participants in Alibaba Group’s online and mobile commerce ecosystem,
including sellers, and other third-party customers and businesses.

Shanyuan
Gao, Chief Architect of Alibaba Infrastructure Services, said: “We are
delighted to become a platinum member of the OCP community, giving us a
tremendous opportunity to share our leading data center technology with
the world. We look forward to collaborating with OCP and its members
around the world to drive the development and adoption of further
technological breakthroughs intended to deliver an even greater impact
for the industry, and we already have plans to contribute our
innovations to OCP.”

“We
now have a hyperscale company from Asia bringing best practices and
thought leadership from the massive scale of their e-commerce
marketplaces and cloud computing infrastructure, while Alibaba Group
extends its involvement in open standards already being adopted
throughout the world,” stated Bill Carter, Chief Technology Officer for
the Open Compute Project Foundation.

“Today,
there are more than 200 OCP members, and we’ve created a shared vision
and venue to design for workloads of the future. We are thrilled Alibaba
Group is bringing their expertise to OCP and contributing to this
strong global community,” stated Jason Taylor, Open Compute Project
Chairman of the Board.