There has been no shortage of coverage on VMware Inc.’s recent decision to embrace OpenStack, the community-led project that threatens to displace its virtualization software as the leading management platform for private clouds, but little attention has been given to the strategic dynamics behind the gambit. Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman  appeared recent episode of SiliconANGLE’s CubeConversations series with colleague Jeff Kelly to shed  light on that aspect of the move and break down what it means for the broader industry rising corporate adoption of open-source technologies (full video below).

VMware Integrated OpenStack, as the company’s attempt at breaking into the distribution wars is called, is a version of the cloud operating system that combines community code with proprietary orchestration components from its existing arsenal of solutions into a tightly-bundled whole. That pits it against the dozens of distros already available on the market today, but as Miniman highlighted, that’s just one part of the competitive picture.

In a bid to provide existing customers of its virtualization software freedom of choice, VMware has integrated the homegrown capabilities underlying its OpenStack offering with competing versions from Mirantis Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and a number of other vendors. Miniman sees that openness as an extension of the vendor’s long-running involvement in the project, which dates back to before it was spun off by original  creator RackSpace Inc. into an independent foundation three years ago. But he stressed that the move to add support for rivaling distributions is hardly just a matter of upholding company tradition.

“If a CIO comes to VMware now and says ‘hey, I want to do OpenStack,’ they can now do that for them… Also, when you look at the entire OpenStack ecosystem, it’s not huge revenue dollars,” he noted, adding that the hypervisor maker’s annual revenue dwarfs what the various distributions generate combined. “So it’s early enough that VMware can get involved and suck the air out of the room,” Miniman explained.

The company is effectively dancing at both weddings, he observed, maintaining a presence in the open-source community that drives the development of OpenStack while promoting its proprietary spin on the project to enterprise buyers. That is a delicate line to walk, but one that VMware is risking nonetheless.

“They are contributing back to these communities, so they’re not just saying ‘we’re just gonna build our thing on our side.’ So I would not say that it’s quite fair to say VMware is nothing but proprietary, but on the other hand they’re not looking to become the Red Hat of OpenStack,” Miniman told Kelly.

Red Hat Inc., for its part, is also trying to secure a dominant position in tomorrow’s cloud market with a two-pronged product strategy that integrates the open-source project with the KVM hypervisor built into Linux, which has been chipping away at VMware’s virtualization dominance in recent years. Nonetheless, the EMC Corp. subsidiary continues to maintain a leadership role in the data center, an advantage that Miniman said it’s actively exploiting to push ahead in the OpenStack ecosystem.

VMware is also extending that strategy to Docker, another open-source cloud project that has been gaining a great deal of traction lately. The software makes it possible to package applications into lightweight containers that can be seemingly moved and scaled across different kinds of infrastructure, functionality Miniman sees as highly complementary to modern workloads such as analytical applications. Recognizing the potential, VMware made Docker a “first-class citizen” in vSphere in conjunction with the introduction of its OpenStack distro.