Grid Dynamics celebrated its 5th anniversary last week, marking a good time to reflect on the company’s growth, and put forth a  plan for the next milestone.  Founded by Victoria Livschitz, Grid Dynamics has a fearless leader that recognizes the trials and opportunities of transition.  Livschitz grew up in East Europe, rising to fame as a chess whiz and eventually becoming a chief architect at Sun Microsystems (read her memoir here).  It was there she realized the promise of cloud computing before cloud computing was even a term, and stepped out to launch her own company around her idea.

No stranger to stepping out on a limb, Livschitz has seen a few cycles in the software industry.  From her childhood into her career, she understood that a strong skill set can be applied to any number of things.  Given today’s current economic status and the technology industry’s anxiety around several concurrently shifting markets, we need fearless leaders to develop a clear understanding of how to best manage transition.

Grid  Dynamics core competencies were founded around its team of experts, well versed in scaling mission critical applications for the enterprise.  Jumping on an opportunity to address enterprise companies’ needs around writing systems at scale, Grid Dynamics also closed a huge expertise gap on dealing with things at scale.  It’s a principle that’s affected an entire industry, creating a booming services market as a result.

One of the biggest transitions Livschitz noticed as her company grew was the move from early adopters to mainstream, harking a warning for those looking to get involved in the cloud industry.  “We have to be careful what we define as cloud,” Livschitz says.  “It’s a concept that means a lot of things to a lot of people.  At one level, cloud computing is not only about cycles or demand or ramping up app capabilities.  It’s a completely new level of animation, control and self-service, or instant gratification if you will, when it comes to consumers of cloud computing.  All enterprises are in one way or another involved in the cloud as far as services go.”

But as Grid Dynamics relies heavily on its collective expertise to aid enterprise adoption of cloud technology, Livschitz recognizes that these companies aren’t really ready to adopt for mission critical applications.  They’re instead building their own private clouds and making them increasingly elastic and on-demand.

Managing transition at the software and computing level has been a struggle affecting an entire industry, but it’s also spurred a great deal of innovation, even bringing some competing paradigms about.  This leaves enterprises caught in an interesting place of experimentation and trust.

One area of exploration is the open source community, with initiatives like OpenStack working their way into enterprise sectors.  Grid Dynamics is an OpenStack partner, though Livschitz admits it’s still a young project with a great community and a lot of velocity.

“We as a community watch this with great interest and develop expertise around it, making it robust and reliable,” Livschitz says.  “It’s hard to say if the community is strong enough to make a true enterprise offering and it will certainly take some time to become mature enough to be a viable choice for the enterprise, which is to be expected.”

While companies like Grid Dynamics work to bring open source cloud projects to the enterprise level, we’re seeing some introductory products entering the market in an effort to ready OpenStack for the enterprise world.  Piston Cloud is among the first to launch an enterprise-ready offering based on OpenStack, with a founding team that hails from RackSpace and NASA, the two companies behind OpenStack’s initiative.

All this industry activity gives Grid Dynamics a lot to think about moving forward, especially as they determine their next steps.  “I see us evolving to cloud-based solutions with a combination of services and intellectual property for IT to encapsulate experiences and know-how we’ve gained in the past five years,” Livschitz explains.  “So a lot of the custom engineering that’s gone into that space brings an understanding of where the industry is.  Take that learning and technology and find a way to build tools and technologies that can add to cloud’s capabilities.”