At the kickoff for the OpenStack Summit 2015, John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE, and Stu Miniman, senior analyst at Wikibon, discussed on theCUBE the key opportunities and challenges facing the OpenStack Foundation and its partners.

According to Miniman, over the five years they’ve been watching OpenStack, some of their original questions have yet to be answered. “I remember when it came out. I think Dave Vellante said it was the ‘Hail Mary’ of the traditional infrastructure vendors to stay relevant in a world where Amazon and Google were taking over.”

OpenStack is making progress

Are they achieving that goal? “OpenStack’s made a lot of progress,” Miniman said. “Where Kilo’s now out, there’s stability in a bunch of the programs. [We’re] starting to see some big-name companies talking about what they’re doing. In the keynote this morning, you had Wal-Mart on stage talking about, it’s not surprising that Walmart, a global retail giant, doesn’t turn to Amazon for their infrastructure. So, they’re throwing a ton of people and resources to leverage OpenStack, talk about how great it is.”

But this doesn’t change his main question: “When will OpenStack be ready for more mainstream adoption and cross that chasm?”

A dominance of big players

Furrier’s concerns took a different tack. “Here’s my take on OpenStack. [It] has to move faster. You have to see more action, speed of deployments, speed of feature releases. They’ve got to harden the IS, Infrastructure of Service, features … But the story to me is the big players. You’re seeing a dominance of the big players coming in. And if you look at the overall contributions, HP alone is contributing more code than ever before … RedHat, you now see Cisco; you are starting to see the big vendors not just throwing lip service at OpenStack but delivering, and I think that’s the key story. And the question is what distributions will be relevant, if they are relevant at all.”

All of the recent new releases may help answer those questions — something that both Furrier and Miniman hope will be revealed over the course of the conference.

“OpenStack is making progress,” Miniman concluded with cautious optimism. “[There’s] a lot of change, a lot of excitement, but still a lot of open questions on OpenStack.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of OpenStack Summit Vancouver 2015.