The OpenStack and Enterprise Forum, focusing on deploying OpenStack in the Next Generation Data Center, takes place on January 29, 2014 at Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

The SiliconANGLE team travelled to the event to broadcast some of the top Panels and interview key speakers, thought leaders and innovators during the flagship interview series, theCUBE. Here’s a recap of one Panel, discussing the remaining challenges OpenStack faces in going mainstream.

Panel 1 – OpenStack: Breaking into the enterprise

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Moderated by Lydia Leong, Research Vice President with Gartner, the panel had two guests – Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director with OpenStack and Ken Pepple, Chief Technology Officer with Solinea – who were invited to discuss the OpenStack trends, the transition from early adopters to mainstream and of course to present some usecases and take questions from the audience.

Lydia clarified that the Forum is not favoring a particular vendor or another. “None of the folks that are here know what questions I’m going to be asking them.”

The forum gathered a big group of people, as Lydia noticed. She went straight to the point by asking the audience how many people here work for OpenStack sponsors (companies that are part of the Foundation). “Most people in this room, if you are not in fact early adopters, you are on the edge trail of more mainstream. You are an important audience for the next stage of evolution of OpenStack,” summarized Leong, who then attempted to identify how OpenStack can transition from the early adopters into the mainstream.

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• Why haven’t you adopted OpenStack yet?

Leong gave the people still contemplating the adoption of OpenStack a voice, formulating a couple of perfectly reasonable questions that are bound to pop-up in regards with this issue:

“So, if I’m really going to adopt OpenStack, what are the requirements? Is OpenStack the right and the best solution for me? How do I deploy it? Do I do it myself or do I work with a service provider? What’s the level of effort required to install this / how do I operate / upgrade / update and so on? What else am I de-facto adopting in the ecosystem along with OpenStack? How much choice do I have betwen the vendors? What’s the future for hibrid cloud?” – these are just a couple of the most frequently asked questions and Leong attempted to answer most of them, as well as any other questions from the crowd, with the help of the guests.

Appealing to their own experience and use cases, Leong tried to clarify exactly what OpenStack is and what it takes to make full use of its platform. “What is OpenStack? Is it a product, a framework or an umbrella foundation for many disconnected products?” she asked.

“Most people look at OpenStack today as a framework for components (that are normally adopted together but that can be adopted separatelly, to some degree). It’s open source software backed by commercial entities – in most cases,” Leong explained.

Today OpenStack can be downloaded and deployed individually, or you could work with a vendor. Most people end up working with a vendor. The project is still evolving as a whole and the adoption of private cloud is also relatively early. Enterprises have to decide if it’s worth migrating the existing workloads, of if they should just go after new workloads.

Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director with OpenStack, started with a short recap of the OpenStack phases so far:

1. 2010-2011, that was the forming of the community, reaching to organizations, getting involvement and development.

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2. 2012 created a non-profit Foundation, there was a lot of momentum, and it brought a broad base of support and governance. In 2012 we started seeing the first traces of adoption, in a serious way, in enterprises and different organizations. For example, companies like Intel, which has been building OpenStack environment applications for 2 and a half years now.

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3. In 2014 I see a strong base of providers, developers, who are producing technology, and a growing base of users.

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“It’s time to get operators and cloud end-users to start to be more embedded into these processes that we put in place,” thinks Bryce. “If you look at the biggest users that we have, a lot of them are working with vendors in some way, but some are doing this by themselves. They tie in components from the storage and networking side, and I think that over the long term the broad base adoption is going to happen in concert with various other companies. Those companies are taking the bits that are OpenStack and they are turning them into products. That is a way that traditional enterprises are used to consuming technology,” summarized Bryce.

“One of the things that’s changing inside the enterprises is that software is becoming much more of a core piece of people’s business, now than it ever has been before.”

Proprietary getting in the way?

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As Leong noted, “the vendor organizations both cooperate and compete, as a result we have a lot of proprietary extensions to OpenStack, which ends up creating challenges for hybrid interoperability and the ability to switch between vendors. What does the Foundation do to address the needs of the users to really understand what OpenStack is?”

“This is a big focus in 2014,” agreed Bryce. “There are a couple of initiatives that we are spending all our resources at the Foundation on. Our goal is to coordinate activities within the community and get a lot of things moving and getting people involved. But two of the key efforts are:

1. A process code-named “DefCore” – a kind of a series of steps taken during the last year to get to an automated testing framework for interoperability for downstream products that come out of OpenStack.

The “DefCore” initiative started up in November, and by the summit in May we’re going to have automated testing and a way for publishing these tests, making it easier for users to understand different solutions and how they match up.

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2. A series of different user engagement events, to basically pull users more directly into the process. It can be intimidating at times to jump into a community for 2000 developers, so we’re putting up a series of smaller events.

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• The OpenStack roadmap

“How is the OpenStack roadmap built?” asked Leong.

“The OpenStack roadmap is built on a six month release process and we are midway through the current release cycle. We do a release, we have an event (it’s called the Design Summit, next one is in May), we establish what the priorities are for the next release, then go and work on them for the next six months,” explained Bryce. “The technical leaders love getting that feedback, but at the summits it’s a little bit late to bring in a big change, so we’re trying to create mid-cycle meet-ups, some of them focused just on users.”

“In terms where OpenStack is going next year, what’s going to be significant?” asked Leong.

“I think a lot of new programs and technology components have spun upon OpenStack and those often get a lot of coverage, but there is a whole new roadmap of other things that are out there, but what is really valuable is happening right now: the users are getting involved,” said Bryce.

“As you look at the future and innovation, to what degree do u expect innovation to be driven by OS?”

“When we started we were trying to come up with a strong, more viable option for the technology that was already out there. As this community has grown, it has drawn in a lot of technical talent from around the world and a lot of different subject areas.”