“As the cloud grows in importance, Netflix is positioned to lead mainstream enterprises to adopt it in droves,” says ReadWrite‘s Matt Asay. Of course, Netflix isn’t primarily a software development firm, but it has created several significant applications related to cloud computing and big data, and it has released those projects under open source licenses. They include The Simian Army and Ice, projects designed to assist with cloud management, and Genie, a Hadoop platform-as-a-service tool.
The company’s open source strategy has helped it recruit developers, and the strategy has also helped to improve Netflix’s tools. Asay concludes, “The company is establishing a path for others to follow. I suspect many will follow.”