During the 2013 OpenStack Summit, Martin Casado, CTO and Co-Founder of Nicira, discussed OpenStack’s successful strategy and software-defined networking with John Furrier and Jeff Frick on SiliconAngle’s theCube.

Furrier reminded us how, in its early days, OpenStack felt like a “pool party,” with everyone jumping in and a lot of market hype. We were very critical of OpenStack, Furrier states, “we thought, if it becomes a vendor-hype environment, it’s going to fail like so many other vendor-driven projects, and clearly that was not the case.”

Casado offered his perspective on OpenStack’s success in driving off the slew of radical viruses that could have potentially ruined the project. He first tipped his hat to Rackspace for doing a phenomenal job of positioning and supporting it with great initial conditions.  But then, he adds, to allow a company like Nicira to go in and innovate, deploy, and offer code, without any push back, is a testimony to their commitment to openness, Casado explains. It’s a delicate balance, but it was achieved.

Furrier also asked Casado to discuss the current state of SDN, software-defined networking. “Right now, I can’t even focus on competition,” Casado explained, “solving customer problems is our first priority. Everyone is still so confused about SDN and how to adopt this technology, because we haven’t have enough products to look at and no easy way to test them, and we’re just now entering the phase where people are able to test drive their software, and that’s because of OpenStack.”

When people buy a car, they like to drive it first, Casado observed.  “OpenStack is a great framework for testing out different components like virtualization, and we’re excited that customers can now get their hands on these things and figure them out.”

See Casado’s entire segment below: