The new partnership, which will be under the Linux Foundation umbrella, is called the Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Framework. The partnership represents HPE's move into the 5G core network space as it branches out from its enterprise roots. Other partners for the open source project include AMI, Apstra, IBM's Red Hat, Tech Mahindra and World Wide Technology.

HPE will introduce an enterprise offering, the HPE Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Resource Aggregator which is designed to model infrastructure elements in every site to simplify infrastructure automation across resources, vendors and geographical locations.

HPE will launch the commercially supported version of the open source infrastructure manageability function along with associated infrastructure-specific plug-in components in the second quarter of this year. HPE said it would tap into industry-defined specifications, including DMTF Redfish interfaces, "to create a vendor-neutral approach for managing configuration and operations of compute, storage and networking infrastructure resources across multiple vendors at scale.

In order for it to be ultimately successful, the new HPE open source project will need buy-in from some of the major service providers, none of which were mentioned in the press release.