Sean Wedige, the chief technology officer for Rackspace’s Global Enterprise Solutions group, stopped by theCube at VMware 2013 to discuss Rackspace, OpenStack and DevOps. He kicked off the interview by sharing his insider’s perspective on the company’s efforts to accelerate the project while maintaining its position in the VMware ecosystem.

Wedige says that as a customer-driven provider, Rackspace aims to provide solutions for workloads rather than specific platforms or environments. Certain applications are best served by the capabilities offered by VMware, he notes, while others stand to benefit from features available with OpenStack.

OpenStack is more than just a framework. Wedige highlights that the platform is used to support over 15,000 hosts, a number that he believes will continue to grow as more enterprises warm up to the technology. He draws comparisons with Linux, which was initially met with uncertainty but is now used to power the majority of Rackspace’s servers.

The cloud provider is working to establish OpenStack as the foundation for an entire ecosystem of federated, interoperable cloud solutions.

“The hybrid capability, the idea that we can have federated clouds and you have workload portability so I’ll choose a medical cloud for one application or choose a high-touch provider like Rackspace for other applications, that vision is very early but that’s where we see this going,” Wedige says. “We see you being able to pick and choose your cloud, if it’s pricing you’re making your decision on, [or] if it’s a service component.”

The executive notes that OpenStack is drawing “strong interest” from international telecoms and developers. Rackspace perceives the latter group as a catalyst for the continued expansion of the project, which is why it operates multiple outreach programs to engage the technical community.

Wedige concludes the discussion with a brief overview of DevOps, which he says is a key element of his company’s innovation roadmap. Rackspace’s success with the methodology has prompted clients to adopt it within their own IT organizations, he notes.