Open source and the telco cloud – new acronyms, familiar software story?

When thinking about how the telco cloud market will play out, it’s important to remember that the telecom Web and application hosting market spans from the very largest carriers – tier 1s running massive co-location and hosting centers to the smallest ISPs delivering hosted email and Wordpress instances.

Driving many of those hosting centers is a broad range of open source software, from Apache Web servers to Tomcat application servers and of course Linux operating systems – delivering a broad-raning (not to mention low-cost) open source software base on top of which the hosting industry has built a very successful business.

As the acronyms of Web hosting – ASP and SaaS – give way to the acronyms of the cloud – IaaS and PaaS – a new generation of software providers are lining up to pitch a new generation of open source software. As in the past, they face “competition” from the very biggest names in the software industry that offer their own commercial alternatives.

The question is: will open source play as big a role in massively complex cloud environments – and will telecom service providers be able to take advantage of the flexibility and economics of those open source cloud platforms.

Several developments this week point to the primacy of open source in the cloud. Rackspace, for instance, unveiled Cloud Builders, a new services unit that will help enterprises and service providers build cloud infrastructure based on the OpenStack platform, a collection of open source technologies that provides the core infrastructure compute and storage capabilities for cloud software stacks. Rackspace helped develop OpenStack and recently acquired Anso Labs, which developed Nova, a key piece of the OpenStack platform.

Meanwhile, startup Cloud.com this week, another cloud open source player – which by its own estimates counts about three-quarters of its customer base as service providers – announced two new service provider deals: with global IT and network services player Tata Communications and U.S.-based managed service provider LogicWorks.

Next: A brief history of open source and telcos