Held yesterday, the ‘OpenStack: Breaking into the Enterprise’ conference was clearly intended as a breakwater against the massive intended disruption to the cloud market brought about by Amazon Web Services and their pay-to-play model of public and private cloud and compute offerings.

Devotees of OpenStack feel the onus is on them to convince the Enterprise why their OpenSource offerings are not only a suitable alternative to both AWS and the traditional vendor lock-in model, familiar to most IT professionals, but also a more preferable alternative to unlocking untapped potential within the Enterprise.

Joining SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier and Wikibon co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante on theCUBE was Ken Pepple, CTO of Solinea. Over the course of his interview, Pepple expounded on several of the points he addressed during his earlier keynote panel discussion.

Starting off the interview, Furrier asked Pepple what, in his opinion, is the hubbub around Enterprise and OpenStack. “I think it’s one of the things that has started to emerge over probably the last six months to a year,” Pepple noted. “We’ve hit a maturity in OpenStack where it’s actually ready. People on the leading edge…have started to be able to go out there and start to use this and bend it to their needs.”

Following up on this train of thought, Vellante asked if this meant the Enterprise was trying to replicate the capabilities of a public cloud, ala Amazon. “And can OpenStack be that vehicle?” Pepple noted that his experience has shown they are not interested in reinventing an Amazon or other public web service experience. “They’re really tailoring it to exactly what they need. And it may not be as much, actually, concentrating on, say, PaaS level services that you might find at Amazon Web Services. They’re able to do that because OpenStack, because it’s OpenSource. It’s a framework.”

See Ken Pepple’s TheCUBE interview in its entirety here:

Vellante then asked if Pepple and Solinea have experienced any push back from high level executives who, perhaps due to their limited technological knowledge paired with their daily and recreational use of more agile systems, want their IT to be just like a Google or a Facebook. “Can I replicate that…in my environment?”

Pepple commented most of his higher level executive interactions are usually at the Chief Technology, Innovation or Marketing Officer level. He claims they usually believe they can increase their operating speed and want to know also if OpenStack can help them to achieve that aim more efficiently in the cloud. Additionally, they are often interested in enabling something they have never done before. “And a lot of that tends to be Big Data today.” Setting an Enterprise up with a cloud can certainly improve operational agility and will yield cost savings. And the best part, as Pepple sees it, is that the Enterprise, employing OpenStack, can implement at their own pace. They are not required to opt solely for a public cloud and either take it or leave it.

“What’s the Big Data stack look like in OpenStack,” Vellante inquired. “And why is it so economically attractive?” Pepple noted that it starts with data in what is basically an object store. From there, the Enterprise would utilize an operational data store, like SolidFire, before bringing in a Big Data analytics package to cull the intelligence from their data.

“Where it really starts to add either lower cost or greater efficiency is the ability to use all of this in OpenSource.” The Enterprise, utilizing OpenStack, can tailor their infrastructure for exactly what they need while not paying the mark-up for public cloud or for transiting their data in and out of that cloud. “You’re looking at OpenSource economics against proprietary economics. And there’s truthfully just no question about which one is going to be better for you.”

The challenge experienced on the service provider side, as Furrier notes, centers around scale. “What do you guys see on the scale side to automate in a way so that it’s not so labor intensive?” Pepple commented, “That has been a major hurdle for people. Especially before the Havana release, you did need a lot of skills and a lot of very deep skills to be able to do that.” Simplification has been achieved by providers packaging OpenStack as an appliance and then selling hardware. Other providers focused on the software side. “I think what we’re starting to see is people starting to converge and say this is really a product.” Pepple notes OpenStack is actually following in the footsteps of both Linux and database distribution.

“I think we’re starting to, since we’ve gotten to a place where people have gotten some best practices around key choices, there’s not so many choices.” While OpenStack offers over 700 different configuration options, Pepple claims there are really only 100 that apply to most Enterprise users. The remainder can be employed by those who require a very specialized installation. “And as we get towards more of a best practice there…or two or three of them…it becomes much easier to create a product around it.”

Furrier finished the interview by asking Pepple to summarize what he sees in the immediate future for OpenStack. “What’s the big a-ha around OpenStack right now? Next 12 months? What’s the critical path for the community, for the technologies, the white spaces?

“So, what I think you’re going to see over the next 12 months is…a simplification of the OpenStack core pieces. And you’re going to see a consensus of the best practice how to roll this out. It’s going to get to a place where your vendors are going to be able to roll it out for you very quickly.” Pepple continued, “I think on the code side, though, you’re going to start to see more and more services around the edges of what was core IaaS as it moves into either PaaS or some other areas. There is where you’re going to find that Enterprise is. And your normal IT will be able to consume it much more rapidly.”

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