In 2015, IBM acquired Blue Box Group, Inc., an on-demand, private cloud services company, to help its clients migrate to the cloud in an open-source, feature-rich environment with the ability to scale to their needs. Blue Box partners with OpenStack to provide Private-Cloud-as-a-Service (PCaaS) to the enterprise.

Jesse Proudman, distinguished engineer and chief technology officer at Blue Box (an IBM Company), spoke to John Furrier, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media production team, to talk about improving OpenStack to provide a better customer experience.

Enterprise traction

According to Proudman, who wants to see OpenStack be successful in the enterprise, there are still problems with the open-source framework’s functionality. “If product is not usable and does not provide a good experience to the customer, nobody will use it,” he said.

He believes that companies focused on delivering a good experience are the companies that will gain traction in the enterprise space. Conversely, he feels that companies that focus on features and bits and bytes provide a different experience for the customer and will not be as successful.

Argument for outsourcing?

Some parts of the open-source community accuse Proudman of making an argument for outsourcing. Answering his critics, Proudman said, “Talent that exists in an organization should be doing work that helps that organization, and differentiating based on raw infrastructure doesn’t move an organization forward. The differentiation exists at the application layers.”

He would like to see engineers in an organization getting applications functional for their businesses instead of spending time to get OpenStack functional. “Let the people who have expertise, experience and view into thousands of customer installations … bring value to your company,” he commented.

Redefining PCaaS

The Blue Box founder want to remove the terms “outsource” and “managed services” from the company’s offerings as it delivers PCaaS. He explained that the company provides the same benefit and experience available in the public cloud and putting it in the data center.

Essentially, this service brings companies up to speed and shortens the time to market. Proudman said that it is a matter of spending a year in building the infrastructure tailored to the company or dropping a rack in the data center and having the cloud operate that day. It all comes down to the company’s specific needs.

So far, Blue Box’s relationship with IBM has been valuable, and the company is seeing incredible momentum in its business.

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

 Photo by SiliconAngle