Radhesh Balakrishnan and Mike Cohen came to the table with Stu Miniman at OpenStack Summit 2015 to talk about the current state of OpenStack. Balakrishnan is the OpenStack general manager with Red Hat,Inc., and Mike Cohen is the director of Product Management at Cisco Systems, Inc.

The conversation started with a look into the state of OpenStack from a maturity perspective. While everyone agreed the platform had a way to go, they saw that the technology and the ecosystem around it had improved. They pointed out that OpenStack had found many new partnerships across multiple divisions.

Listening to the customers

Things then turned toward what customers are doing with OpenStack. Balakrishnan and Cohen explained that OpenStack was definitely becoming part of the conversation and that the discussion around the tech was more sophisticated than ever before. They noted that people were building OpenStack Clouds and that open source software, like OpenStack, had a strong role to play in the future.

The two saw that customers wanted a fast, agile network that would allow them to accelerate application development. To achieve that, software would be very important. Just as important, though, would be intelligently leveraging hardware assets. Open source software could help deliver on that promise.

The business of open source

A common theme to discussions about open source software is the issue of monetizing the product, and this was no exception. The reply was that Red Hat and OpenStack offered a subscription service that allowed them to build a product management relationship. From this, they could also offer other value-added services.

As for the show itself, Balakrishnan and Cohen were impressed that OpenStack had moved beyond the stage of innovators and early adopters. The attendees at the current show were more enterprise-oriented, with some big names in the audience. It was a sign that the maturing OpenStack had almost become mainstream.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of OpenStack Summit Vancouver 2015.