This week Kyle Mestery joined IBM as distinguished engineer and director of open source networking. He recently held a similar position at HP.

Mestery says he left HP because, “This was really about a great opportunity within IBM. I'll be building and leading a team focused on making OpenStack networking work at scale for IBM's public and hybrid cloud products. We'll be doing all this work upstream and feeding it back into the community, and it will encompass the entire open source networking stack from Neutron to Open vSwitch (OVS) to Open Virtual Networking (OVN).”

IDC analyst Brad Casemore says, “Mestery is a prominent presence in the OpenStack community, and his voice carries weight. It’s clearly a plus for IBM.”

As far as OpenStack at HP, it’s the core of both the company’s public-cloud offering and its private-cloud offering.

“They’ve done a lot of work on the networking side to address known weaknesses in Neutron,” says Casemore. “In fact, it was a major issue for HP when they built out their public OpenStack cloud.”

Just yesterday, the 12th release of OpenStack - Liberty - was unveiled. Liberty addresses user requests for finer-grained management controls and performance enhancements for large deployments. Liberty also brings the first full release of the Magnum containers management project. Magnum supports the container cluster management tools Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm.

For the Liberty release, 1,933 individuals across more than 164 organizations contributed with the top code committers being HP, Red Hat, Mirantis, IBM, Rackspace, Huawei, Intel, Cisco, VMware, and NEC.

Mestery says, “IBM was heavily involved in Liberty: 187 IBM developers participated in 13,256 code reviews, implemented 45 blueprints, and fixed 509 bugs for a total of over 280,000 lines of code. This is a 50 percent increase in contributors from the last release. Our shining accomplishment is that IBM is leading the development of the RefStack project with 58 percent of overall commits and reviews.”