The community is a vital part of any software company, heck any company period. Marc Chenn (CEO & Co-Founder, Saltstack) lives that message of community making a company. Don’t believe me? Saltstack was named to Github’s Top 10 for community contributors, just behind OpenStack in 2012. Chenn said that Saltstack has roughly 400 active contributors to the community. He stopped by #theCUBE yesterday to discuss IT operations management with co-hosts John Furrier and Jeff Frick at #OpenStack Summit 2013.

Saltstack are an IT operations management company that provides remote execution and configuration management. The software helps with cloud orchestration, server automation and IT infrastructure management. How Saltstack got started is a story worth hearing if you’re a floundering entrepreneur trying to get a foothold on your idea. Chenn and his partner identified the maturation of two separate movements: Open source and configuration management. Once identified, they started Saltstack as an open source project to see if the product was viable.

Identify. Execute a first iteration. Feedback from the community/users. The holy trinity of steps for launching a start-up project. Chenn went on to further detail that Saltstack has been very open with its users about a plan to commercialize the technology and go to market. As part of a growing DevOps movement, Chenn sees the IT operations management space as “undergoing a renaissance,” in his words. Chenn and Saltstack believes that you are going to start to see solutions that focus on features sets that enhance existing software.

As far as early use cases, Saltstack has seen OpenStack enable organizations to move onto OS’s and deploy more quickly. Their clients are looking for enhanced configuration systems, and Chenn explained that while their solution is on premise only, they will be offering SaaS soon. A big trend Saltstack is seeing is the shift of power towards the users. Another trend he is seeing is stealth IT, or the way you buy software: the ability to have a technology to you can pay for and start using immediately. If you can get either of these trends right, Chenn says you’ll have a fighting chance.

Software is moving to a tech first, frictionless-entry model. Power is being shifted to the users, and the industry is having to reshuffle all of the deck chairs.