UPDATED 14:30 EDT / MAY 12 2014

StackStorm: Seizing opportunity amid disruption | #openstacksummit

PowellSiliconANGLE’s theCUBE is broadcasting live from this week’s #OpenStackSummit thanks in part to our exclusive sponsors for this event, Red Hat and Brocade. Co-hosts John Furrier and Stu Miniman welcomed the CEO of StackStorm, Evan Powell. StackStorm emerged from stealth last week and has gone into private beta effective today. The companies website offers a beta request form for those companies that currently have a focus on DevOps within the OpenStack architecture.

Powell, in discussing the niche StackStorm is aiming to fill, stated that his company believes the OpenStack community, having already embraced DevOps and virtualization, is on the cusp of a third wave. “We are automating the automators,” he explained. “Our product is the definition on top of the Software Defined Storage.” StackStorm intends to deliver increased productivity by orders of magnitude over what is currently achievable today. According the company’s website, they ‘want operations automations to be more powerful, easier to author, fully transparent, and self-learning.’

Citing innovative companies like PayPal and Facebook, Powell stated StackStorm means to provide an effective solution to smaller companies and Enterprise customers who may not have the budget to employ a massive team of developers that are familiar with the entire stack. StackStorm’s beta offering is intended to take existing scripts and make them more intelligent, he said.

Watch the interview in its entirety here:

Many Enterprise customers, Miniman pointed out, will require pre-built solutions. “Most aren’t going to build their own apps and they have their legacy baggage,” he stated. He then asked how StackStorm intended to speak to those very real concerns and requirements.

Powell explained that StackStorm would not promise over the moon results if only the Enterprise client would rip out their existing legacy products. “We work with what they already have,” he stated. “We can help them by starting small, too.”

StackStorm, which is a 100 percent open source product, will be offered as a platform-agnostic entity. “The freemium model for OpenStack users,” he said, “they may want to run on prem. For Amazon customers, they may want to run it in the Cloud.”

Going forward, StackStorm will be, according to Powell, the best offering available in a segment of the industry that has already benefited from disruption. “Now it is ripe for someone to come in and make it more intelligent,” he stated.

For this and other segments originally broadcast live on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE, be sure to stop by the SiliconANGLE YouTube channel.


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