“OpenStack is ready,” according to Omri Gazitt, VP of products and services at Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE’s) Helion Group. Gazitt sat down with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during OpenStack Summit 2016 in Austin, Texas. The topics of conversation included his past experience at Microsoft, Helion Group’s trajectory, and OpenStack’s ever-increasing maturity.

Gazitt said of his time at Microsoft: “It was a little bit harder to work on open source,” but, he added, “Microsoft has really changed.” However, change seems to be the norm within HPE’s Helion Group. Gazitt remarked that in business, “you kind of overestimate what you can get done in a year and underestimate what you can get done in five years.”

In regards to OpenStack, he said the “platform has gone through an evolution and is now mature.” He continued, stating that when OpenStack “can support a lot of workloads, you know it’s successful.” Gazitt also said that in 2015, we started seeing enterprises running pet workloads on OpenStack — something unheard of previously.

Why HPE is focusing on private clouds

Gazitt commented on HPE’s decision to move away from public cloud, calling it a “race to the bottom.” Instead the company has decided to focus on private clouds. Gazitt remarked that HPE’s Cloud-Native App Platform runs everywhere (on public clouds and OpenStack clouds) and that is the “best of both worlds.”

The Helion Group is working on several aspects of OpenStack, including live migration and improving its appeal to IT professionals. His team would like to “capture the hearts of developers” with auto-scaling.

Businesses are getting “serious about taking the plunge with OpenStack,” concluded Gazitt. The industry will watch OpenStack as it continues to develop its “operational maturity,” he added.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of OpenStack Summit — Austin. And make sure to weigh in during theCUBE’s live coverage at the event by joining in on CrowdChat.

Photo by SiliconANGLE