(UPDATE 2:30 p.m.: Added mention of David Lenrow joining OpenDaylight's TSC.)

HP is upping its commitment to OpenDaylight, announcing today that it's becoming a platinum member.

That means contributing more money, but more importantly, it also means committing people to the project — at least 10 full-time equivalents for two years. HP has a head start on that, as it's helping with the OpenDaylight controller and with a newly approved project for authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA).

The move could be interpreted as a sign that HP is now willing to take OpenDaylight more seriously. HP was an OpenDaylight founding member — but in those early days, a lot of companies harbored skepticism about the project and were concerned about the involvement of Cisco and IBM (mostly Cisco).

“What I've seen in HP is a company that really wanted to do its due diligence,” says Neela Jacques, OpenDaylight executive director. “HP took the time to really validate a lot of the questions around OpenDaylight — what would the governance be like? What kind of developers would show up, and what would be the quality of the code?”

Now HP will be beefing up its presence, expecting to make a bigger impact on the project. “When we show up in any of these spaces, we tend to move the needle” in terms of code contribution and project leadership, says Sarwar Raza, HP's director of cloud networking and SDN. Raza will be joining the OpenDaylight board, filling the seat that HP is entitled to as a platinum member.

In addition, David Lenrow will be joining OpenDaylight's Technical Steering Committee, the group that, among other things, is in charge of code releases. Lenrow is an architect at HP and a vice-chair of the Northbound Interfaces working group in the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) — but you really know him for being a contributor to SDxCentral.

HP becomes the ninth platinum member of OpenDaylight, following Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Ericsson, IBM, Juniper, Microsoft, and Red Hat. The project has two gold members and a couple dozen silver members.

Lately, HP seems to be reaffirming its love for all things “open,” as the OpenDaylight upgrade comes on the heels of last week's $1 billion commitment to HP's OpenStack-based public cloud during the next two years. Separately from all that, HP has named Senior Vice President Antonio Neri to run the Networking division, succeeding Bethany Mayer, as SDxCentral learned on Friday.

A quick word about that AAA project. It's about providing authentication for APIs (as opposed to the AAA servers in telecom networks, which authenticate end users). Similar in concept to OpenStack Keystone, OpenDaylight's AAA service would let the network confirm roles and privileges for an API that's requesting access.