Internap was one of  the first companies to deploy OpenStack in 2011, said Raj Dutt, the company’s Senior Vice President of Technology, in a conversation with Gartner Moderator, Lydia Leong. The two debated OpenStack advantages within the OpenStack Enterprise Forum keynote, broadcast live by theCUBE today.

The early adoption of OpenStack meant deploying it while it was still immature, which was an adventure, according to Dutt. Internap is interested in “fast moving open source projects,” Dutt said. “We really have no interest in developing the core infrastructure architecture. OpenStack is really attractive, it allows us to build on top of, expand upon,” allowing for a competitive time to market.

Asked how the company differentiates, Dutt said they did offer a public cloud, but they address the needs of collocation customers who “struggle to make their infrastructure agile,” but they are restricted. “We’re using OpenStack to allow them to  bring agility to a more traditional service offering.” Internap also offers a bare-metal server, raw server with an operating system. “We use OpenStack to provide bare-metal service on demand,” He said. The goal is bridging the old school and the new trends.

Talking about typical use cases, Dutt said that, as a service provider, the key verticals for Internap were ad tech, gaming, and education institutions. They focus on customers “that are running infrastructure at scale” who are are interested in the advantages OpenStack can bring.

Asked why it was cheaper to get cloud from Internap, vs Amazon and other providers, Dutt said that the first reason was bare-metal. “The dedicated server industry has a different pricing model than the virtualized industry.” Another reason was the ability to leverage OpenStack on infrastructure that the customer owned, creating an offering similar to a private cloud.

Commenting on what customers are doing with OpenStack based products, Dutt said a fair bit have developed on top of it, “it’s so theoretically accessible, it’s a low barrier” to try it. However, they tend to get in over their heads. OpenStack has a pretty high bar, especially if it’s not a tech company.

“We’re building a lot of things around OpenStack,” Dutt explained, “but we are definitely relying on it for the core things it provides. We are also adding a lot of surrounding, orbiting, ecosystem tools. 100% of our go forward infrastructure is powered by OpenStack.”