UPDATED 12:53 EDT / DECEMBER 13 2012

Breaking Analysis: EMC Drives More Momentum Behind OpenStack, Juniper Pockets Contrail for $176M

A major player in storage has finally joined the ranks of the OpenStack open-source cloud effort. Yesterday, EMC was listed as a corporate sponsor of OpenStack. EMC global marketing CTO Chuck Hollis announced their support for OpenStack in a blog post on Tuesday, stating that OpenStack has “matured into a serious enterprise operating environment.” Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman opted to quibble with Hollis on the
maturity level of OpenStack, but nevertheless said, “I think it definitely speaks to the industry momentum that OpenStack is gaining.”

With all of the open cloud solutions, there are multiple stack options out there. Miniman emphasized that EMC needs to avoid being seen as “too proprietary” and being a part of the OpenStack community will help accomplish that. Also, he said that EMC’s top priority today is the virtualization stacks. Miniman summarized EMC’s strategy by saying, “EMC, as its tradition, is playing the field. They’re going to have multiple options, fill out a broad portfolio and engage customers and make sure they’re not going to lose any strategic positions to its competitors.”

EMC has compared this to the Linux wave from ten years ago. Miniman believes this is a valid comparison, with the slow growth path OpenStack has experienced and with enterprise not yet adopting it. EMC has made statements about increasing customer interest in the last six months. He referenced Wikibon Chief Analyst Dave Vellante’s comment of calling OpenStack the “Hail Mary” by the investing vendor community to go against Amazon, but at the moment, Miniman said, Amazon is still the king of cloud space.

In other news, Juniper announced that they are going to be buying a little known start-up called “Contrail” for $176 million in both stocks and cash.  Miniman said they expect to see a run of acquistions, many of them being what he termed as “SDN washed.” Contrail was still in the very early stages of its business, and for them to be pulled off the market so soon before they were really established has everyone talking.  Miniman said, “[Mergers and acquisitions] in the SDN space has got everyone buzzing.”  See the entire segment with Kristin Feledy and Stu Miniman on the Morning NewsDesk Show.


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU