Symbian backs an open cloud

Mobile operating system maker Symbian has announced its support for the Open Cloud Manifesto, an initiative dedicated to the promotion of open IT ideals among cloud providers and users.

In a blog post, Ian McDonald, head of IT for the Symbian Foundation argued that with the popularity of cloud computing growing all the time, “there is a real need to ensure that the cloud is open and not a proprietary lock-in”.

“Symbian is an organisation that is passionate about being open – the planning for our releases, the decision making processes (including the councils) and all our code are out in the open,” he wrote.

“As such we totally support the Open Cloud Manifesto which is working to ensure that different cloud offerings can work together and that there are open standards.”

McDonald added that Symbian uses over 20 cloud providers internally, for tasks such as email and file storage.

“Symbian Ideas, Symbian Horizon and this blog run on cloud infrastructure, and we have plans to shift nearly all our sites onto the cloud in the next few months,” he explained.

Symbian will join some big tech names on the list of Open Cloud Manifesto supporters including Sun Microsystems, Juniper Networks and Novell.

However, at present its rivals in the smartphone platform market including Google, Microsoft, Nokia and Apple have yet to pledge their support for the initiative.