As a four-year-old company, PLUMgrid, Inc. has big dreams of bringing OpenStack networking into the mainstream.

“We provide networking in software. If you’ve heard of overlay networking constructs where you do multi-host networking right on a Linux kernel itself, that’s what we do,” Awais Nemat, PLUMgrid’s CEO, told theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s production team, at OpenStack Summit Vancouver 2015. “We specifically focus on OpenStack, and what we do is we make OpenStack enterprise-ready,”

OpenNetworking Suite for OpenStack

That’s a big claim, but Nemat says his company can deliver.

“The networking piece is called Neutron [OpenStack’s networking component],” he explained. “We provide secure, scalable and automated solutions for the Neutron piece of OpenStack that go above and beyond what Neutron can do at this time. That’s where we fit in; that’s our core product offering. It’s called OpenNetworking Suite for OpenStack. What we do is we integrate into a very broad set of distributions.”

Networking in the mainstream

Why has it taken networking longer than some of OpenStack’s other components to be enterprise-ready?

“It’s still early … infrastructure takes a long [time], and four years is not much in the infrastructure life cycle,” Nemat said. “Many things have happened; many good things have happened already. We are well into it at this point in time, but enterprises are just starting up.”

It was the perfect technology for telecom and cable companies who wanted to build large, public Clouds, but because of the start-up time and project-based nature of OpenStack, it’s taken longer to make it into the mainstream.

“It’s has started to go into enterprises, and there is a lot of work; there are a lot of missing links that need to be put in place before it’s entirely enterprise-ready,” Nemat stated. “But the good thing is, some early enterprises that are adopting it, they’re deploying it, and use cases of communication as a service are coming up along with other use cases we have seen.”

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

Photo by SilconANGLE