The Linux Foundation | 11 November 2025
IBM joins the Foundation to advance the organizations’ shared commitment to open, transparent, and community-driven search and analytics innovation
Summary
- The OpenSearch Software Foundation announced IBM has joined as a Premier Member, strengthening the global open source community and driving next-generation search, analytics and AI innovation
- IBM’s membership deepens collaboration across retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector search and open agentic AI ecosystems
- The partnership reinforces a shared commitment to open, interoperable, and transparent AI infrastructure, ensuring high-performance, cost-efficient, and explainable retrieval at scale
- IBM will contribute enterprise-grade enhancements and cloud-tested patterns to advance observability, security and developer experience across the OpenSearch ecosystem
ATLANTA – KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America – Nov. 11, 2025 – The OpenSearch Software Foundation, the vendor-neutral home for the OpenSearch Project, today announced that IBM, a leading provider of global AI, hybrid cloud and consulting expertise, has joined the Foundation as a Premier Member.
With the rapid adoption of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to power AI applications, developers and enterprises need transparent, performant, and community-governed search infrastructure. This investment from IBM signals a broader shift toward open agentic ecosystems with open source tools and frameworks at the core.
“IBM’s commitment to the OpenSearch Software Foundation is a testament to the role open source search and analytics play in AI-enabled enterprises of the future,” said Bianca Lewis, executive director of the OpenSearch Software Foundation. “Our member organizations help shape and develop the tools and technology that make intelligent operations a reality, and we are thrilled that IBM has joined the Foundation, strengthening our community and mission.”
IBM’s membership builds on its existing open source efforts with OpenSearch. IBM will announce and detail a new open source project featuring OpenSearch on the upcoming OpenRAG Summit livestream on Thursday, November 13. Visit https://luma.com/open-rag-summit to register for the event.
As a Premier Member, IBM aims to deepen integration between OpenSearch and its open source ecosystem, improving vector search performance, multimodal document ingestion and developer experience for AI agents. It also plans to contribute enterprise-grade enhancements to OpenSearch’s observability and security solutions as well as high-availability patterns tested through IBM Cloud deployments. It also plans to collaborate with the OpenSearch community on educational initiatives and joint showcases – beginning with OpenRAG’s public preview and live demonstrations at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America.
"As part of IBM's work in the evolution of AI, we're thrilled to contribute to the development of OpenSearch," said Ed Anuff, vice president of data and Al platform strategy at IBM. "By joining the Foundation, we are helping ensure that production generative Al can be built on a robust open source foundation."
DataStax, an IBM company, chose OpenSearch when it needed to build high-performance, production-ready vector search that could scale to billions of vectors without sacrificing recall or breaking budgets. By integrating Java-based vector search library JVector with OpenSearch through a custom plugin for dense vector retrieval, the team accelerated innovation, achieved lower query latency and faster index builds, and reduced infrastructure overhead. This collaboration demonstrates how open, production-ready search can power real-world AI and retrieval workloads efficiently at scale.
To learn more about the OpenSearch Software Foundation, including how to get involved, become a member or contribute, please visit foundation.opensearch.org/.
About the OpenSearch Software Foundation
The OpenSearch Software Foundation is a vendor-neutral community for search, analytics, observability, and vector database software. Hosted by the Linux Foundation and supported by premier members such as AWS, SAP and Uber, the OpenSearch Software Foundation works with community maintainers, developers, and member organizations to drive the continued growth of the OpenSearch project. With more than 1 billion software downloads since its inception and participation from thousands of contributors, the OpenSearch project and its community are transforming how information is managed and discovered. To learn more, please visit foundation.opensearch.org.
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Media Contact
Kristi Piechnik
The Linux Foundation
kpiechnik@linuxfoundation.org