John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, kicked off Day 2 of AWS re:Invent conference with Jerry Chen of Greylock Partners. As his bio reveals, “Jerry invests in new enterprise applications and in all aspects of cloud and application infrastructure,” so he was invited to elaborate on the OpenStack vs. Amazon bet.

“OpenStack is the great hope for the Enterprise,” said Furrier. “But Amazon is rolling out massive services; is it a two-horse race?” he asked.

“I don’t think it’s a two-horse race yet,” replied Chen, “but Amazon is quickly becoming the market soft monopoly in the public cloud. At their size and scale, it will soon become very hard to compete against them.”

To differentiate between the two, Chen further explained: “OpenStack’s philosophy is ‘All things to all people’ – meaning open source and multiple projects. Amazon’s philosophy is ‘One cloud to all people’. The race is not over yet, but it’s two different philosophies going on right now,” said Chen. “They are two different camps.”

Because of the sheer scale of Amazon, their standards tend to become the norm, as Chen noted: “The Amazon APIs are becoming the Lingua Franca for the infrastructure of the service. But debating the APIs is not important. If you do the APIs right, and you make it pretty easy for other developers to adopt them, you create really great developers’ services around it: Database services, Storage services, Security services – those are the things developers really care about,” added Chen.

Cloud Plus and SaaS minus

“In a world where we have multiple SaaS providers and multiple Clouds, you are going to need to integrate and stitch together a mash-up of applications,” warns Chen. “You have WorkDay for HCM, SalesForce for CRM applications, your own custom website running on Amazon, there are different clouds and the question of connecting and moving the data around. There’s going to be at least a layer to stitch together this multi-cloud world.”

Furrier believes that “Amazon is not going to break the Enterprise right away,” and Chen sees three potential outcomes regarding the evolution around enterprise public cloud like Amazon:

1 – Amazon invests enough engineering and product talent to make their cloud Enterprise-friendly, focuses on Privacy, Security, Reliability.

2 – Other startups attempt to make Amazon more Cloud and Enterprise-friendly: Security, Privacy, Reliability.

3 – Developers out there engineer around Amazon’s weaknesses. They know Amazon is Enterprise-friendly, but it has a bunch of flaws around Security and Privacy, and they write their apps around those weaknesses.

“It’s a race to see who wins,” predicted Chen.

Offering a voice to the viewers commenting on CrowdChat.net, John Furrier asked Chen “How are cloud providers catering to provide low latency access to developing markets like India, Indonesia and Philippines?”

“I think that the world is looking at two or three different clouds: US-dominated cloud, China-dominated cloud, and the rest of the world,” said Chen. But only a handful of the providers have the scope and the means to reach globally. For the rest of the world, there’s a federation of multiple players and partnerships across different geographical regions.

The interview wrapped with Chen mentioning the VDI market. “I started the VDI movement. We started that in 2005-2006, it’s a great service for large enterprises who need need secure managed desktops. But nowadays VDI is part of a larger solution; it’s significant, but not enough.”