At the end of day 1 of this week’s #openstacksummit, broadcast live from Atlanta on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE, co-hosts John Furrier and Stu Miniman reflected on the full complement of guests who joined them at the desk today to share their thoughts and experiences with the OpenStack platform.

It was Furrier who noted his first impressions of the event, thus far, were generally positive. Attendees, nearly doubling the attendance of last year’s event, seemed excited on day 1. Additionally, he discussed the momentum being experienced by the OpenStack Foundation, a topic of an earlier interview with Eileen Evans and Monty Taylor. “That’s a great story,” he stated.

Another interesting fact coming out of the first day was a couple of important endorsements by some big corporate players. Both Disney and Wells Fargo threw their support behind the OpenStack platform. However, according to Miniman, with little mid-range deployment of OpenStack he predicted a fairly sizable adoption gap for the platform. That chasm might just be crossed due to big players like HP, IBM, Red Hat and Cisco actively pushing OpenStack. “But if we don’t start seeing big money coming into OpenStack in the next 12-18 months,” he claimed, “this whole thing could implode.”

Watch the day 1 wrap-up in its entirety here:

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While that prediction is alarming, Furrier believes the serious players behind OpenStack when they state emphatically that the platform is clearly still in early days. “They want to make sure to win the Cloud first before going big,” Furrier explained. “They want to get it right from the start. I don’t see red flags. But I see a calm before the storm.”

Mentioned above as a power player in the platform, Furrier stated Red Hat needs a fire lit underneath them. “They have the poll position and it’s theirs to lose,” he stated. “I think they have the chops to do it.”

Just before the broadcast day’s wrap-up, theCUBE welcomed the CEO of MetaCloud, Sean Lynch, who discussed his company’s goal to provide the OpenStack platform to people that don’t get OpenStack. “Here is why I like MetaCloud,” Furrier offered. “It’s a DevOps as a Service styled model.” According to him, developers who make the shift to the DevOps world do not return to the old way of working. “[MetaCloud’s] will be the preferred experience. We are looking for that from other companies as well,” he said.

The one thing Miniman said he was looking for from the conference but had yet to see was any type of really big, industry-shaking announcement. “I’m not hearing it.”

Over the next two days, SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE will welcome several more guests. Both Furrier and Miniman, as well as the entire production team urge you to join in on the conversation by using our CrowdChat application, which just today was responsible for over 2 million timeline impressions.