The OpenStack Foundation’s gathering this week was characterized by much talk of collaboration and little major news, according to one technology reporter in attendance. The journalist suggested that maturity of the technology may be one contributing factor.

“With all respect to the OpenStack Foundation and its member projects, there’s not as much excitement,” said Sean Michael Kerner (pictured), senior editor at eWeek. “This is now a stable, mature ecosystem, and because of that, I don’t think there is as much of a draw. If they had put the name ‘blockchain’ in the title, maybe they would have had a few more [attendees].”

Kerner spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), chief reckoner at TechReckoning, at OpenStack Summit in Vancouver. They discussed one of the conference’s more controversial keynotes and investor concern over the prospects for startup success within OpenStack.

Canonical founder hits competitors

One of the opening day keynote speakers — Canonical Ltd founder Mark Shuttleworth — made news in a different way by leveling a critique of his competitors. In his remarks, Shuttleworth urged companies to abandon VMware Inc. and claimed that Canonical was winning a majority of bids in head-to-head competition with Red Hat Inc.

“Usually in a keynote, you don’t take direct aim at competitors, and he chose to do that,” Kerner said. “In an open community there’s almost an unwritten rule, which perhaps will be written after this conference, that … this is neutral territory and everybody’s kind of friendly. It made some people a little uncomfortable.”

Kerner noted that one of the issues facing the OpenStack community has been the number of firms that were incubated in the space yet did not survive. This has cooled investor interest, according to the journalist.

“There are so many companies that raised funding who disappeared,” Kerner said. “There’s been tremendous consolidation. When venture capitalists lose money, they lose interest really fast.”

Despite the startup churn and competitive needling in the OpenStack world, Kerner still sees potential for the enterprise technology. “OpenStack is core infrastructure that runs important assets,” Kerner stated. “I’m curious to see how it continues to evolve. I don’t think we’ve heard the end of the OpenStack story yet.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE