Intel has significantly increased its financial commitment to the OpenDaylight Project and will gain a seat on the nonprofit open source initiative's board of directors, the company announced Thursday.

A founding member of the project, Intel now jumps from the silver membership level to become the 11th platinum member, following a similar move from Dell in October. In general, the big companies that took a wait-and-see approach to OpenDaylight at first are starting to commit more fully.

Platinum members pay annual dues of $500,000, versus $5,000 to $20,000 for silver members, an OpenDaylight spokeswoman confirms.

With the additional contribution comes an appointment to the OpenDaylight board of directors, which Intel has tapped Uri Elzur, the company's SDN system architecture director, to fill.

Since its founding in 2013, which SDxCentral was the first to report, the OpenDaylight Project has delivered open source toolkits and standards for building software-defined networking (SDN) controllers.

“The SDN controller is a key component in Intel’s software defined infrastructure (SDI),” Elzur said in a statement. “By playing a larger role in a community of like-minded industry leaders through OpenDaylight, we aim to advance the capabilities, deployment, automation and agility of SDI.”

Earlier this year, the OpenDaylight Project's bylaws were amended to ensure platinum members are also guaranteed an appointment to OpenDaylight's technical steering committee. Intel's Rajeev Koodli is slated to join the committee.