This week’s news from OsCon reveals another vendor looking for ways to take money off the table leveraging OpenStack. A recent post from GigaOm analyst, Paul Miller, highlights the fact that although open source is gaining traction, companies are still looking for commercial solutions. One reason sited includes the need for a “single throat to choke” on support and development of new functionality. This begs the question of success for open source as a cloud platform in the enterprise, and what unique value these commercial solutions will offer. Interestingly enough, Paul asks users to respond to a polling question “In which areas are users willing to adopt open source solution’s on their own?” The results to this research will be interesting for many.
Will enterprises allow open source into the cloud stacks?
Some of the media articles are making reference to open source stacks, like OpenStack, being equivalent to tomorrow’s Linux. Maybe that’s true and everyone will have a flavor of OpenStack, customized internally or commercialized? That said, we can also look at other open source offerings like Xen and see the impact it had on virtualization. You may equate Xen to Amazon and the beginning of the cloud, or you may equate Xen as a failed attempt by Citrix to be where VMware is today? The facts are open source solutions may be good for some, but not others. Given OpenStack is a group of commercial vendors, including Citrix, Cisco, Dell, newly added HP, Abiquo and many others, that are all looking for an easier way to sell a cloud solution to service providers and businesses, will it be the answer customers are looking for? Stay tuned as we explore this option with analysts, customers and vendors– or join the cloud management linkedin group to be part of the discussion.