The State of OpenStack - OpenStack Enterprise Forum - theCUBE
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2014-01-30

Panel Discussion Part 2,OpenStack Enterprise Forum with Jonathan Bryce, OpenStack and Ken Pepple, Solinea

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Five years ago, the buzzword emerging from the tech world was "cloud." The somewhat ethereal concept promised to revolutionize how business gets done. And in an era when an idea or trend travels from conception to widespread accepted reality in seeming hyper drive, the working understanding and adoption of cloud strategies for the Enterprise has been stunningly slow to take hold in storefronts and boardrooms across the business landscape.

In Mountain View, California yesterday, industry leaders and the OpenStack Foundation convened a first-of-its-kind conference aimed at educating the Enterprise on not only the immediate opportunities, but also strategies that will make the wholesale deployment of the OpenStack platform a benefit to business operations.

As an open source option, OpenStack, utilizing a set of shared resources provided by more than 9,500 individual members, is meant to revolutionize and replace the heretofore ubiquitous lock-in vendor model that has dominated the IT world.

Speaking in one of the keynote panel sessions, Ken Pepple, co-founder and CTO of Solinea, addressed the audience speaking to the concerns of cloud adoption among Enterprise consumers. As it stands, they don't ask specifically about OpenStack. They want to know if they should adopt and how they should go about doing it. Additionally, they have questions about data governance and how safe their data will be in the cloud.

"A lot of our work is actually in the Enterprise and it comes in at a different point we call the strategy point," Pepple said. He continued by stating that it is bad for an organization to simply adopt a generic cloud deployment. The truth of the matter is most organizations will require both private and public cloud.

Lydia Leong, research vice president in the Technology and Providers group for Gartner, moderated the panel. She inquired of Pepple how long it would take for the average organization to achieve knowledge transfer after deployment. "I think it comes to how much they are willing to change their organization. If they are willing to create a new organization and break down walls between different groups in the company so they can communicate, it could be a few weeks." Of course, larger, less agile organizations may require as much as a few years.

Pepple believes that effective strategy and adoption will only become more and more valuable as hybrid virtual clouds become more of a reality. He also sees it becoming increasingly easier as the architecture matures.

"With most of our customers, we try to start small with a proof of concept. Then we go in and highlight specific new workloads to show value. A lot of times there will be a cost component with it. But a lot of our customers are dealing with new capabilities they haven't used before. It's easier to show value from implementation with those capabilities."

The goal, of course, of the conference is to broaden the appeal of OpenStack to the Enterprise. Pepple sees the traditional lock-in model, still favored by organizations at odds with the creation and implementation of very specific solutions that dictate down to specific hardware required for operation. "They [Enterprise customers] want something in between. We are starting to converge to the middle now. As we start getting polish on some of the areas, apprehension around adoption will start to disappear."