Openstack Summit in Portland Oregon kicks off today with top tech companies like HP, Netapp, Cisco, Rackspace, and Red Hat coming together with startups like Servicemesh, Hortonworks,  announcing new product initiatives in a effort to slow down the advances of Amazon Web Services (AWS) into the enterprise and service provider markets.

The OpenStack ecosystem is growing at a very rapid pace, becoming increasingly fragmented as a result.   With the momentum of the Openstack Summit from the big players and emerging startups the open source angle becomes more important.   Unification around the governance has improved and the results are showing.

Openstack has grown in popularity because the large enterprises want a faster way to build their cloud solutions.  Right now AWS is gaining ground and according to Dave Vellante at Wikibon it’s a matter of time before they make big strides in the enterprise.

Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman adds “that CIOs should be a “little cautious” when it comes to OpenStack: the platform is not quite enterprise-ready, but it is suitable for service providers that are willing to spent time and effort on tweaking the platform for their specific use cases. It may also come in handy for certain internal initiatives.”

“So enterprises and CIOs, I recommend that they definitely look at what OpenStack is doing here, look at the partners they’re working with, both from a service provider standpoint and the vendor standpoint,” Miniman says. “OpenStack is maturing, it does seem to be getting some traction, and it’s definitely something that they can easy put test/dev environments into or some of the more scale-out architectures that might be able to take advantage of some of the lower cost solutions that are available with OpenStack.”

Bottom line:

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Openstack is now a real viable open initiative that allows enterprises and service providers to quickly build “enterprise grade” cloud solutions.

With Openstack customers can have the freedom to purchase whichever technology brand they want.  This is the overall opportunity with OpenStack’s vendor-neutral model.