In their constant quest for tech athletes, John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCube co-hosts, persuaded Rick Jackson, CMO of Rackspace (formerly the CMO of VMware) to talk about his recent career change and the company and open stack.

As the Chief Marketing Officer at Rackspace, the Open Cloud Company, Rick Jackson is leading the global marketing strategy in the evolving hybrid cloud market. Rackspace is the founder of OpenStack, the standard open-source operating system for cloud computing.

Asked about the cloud and the opportunities it provided, Rick Jackson admitted “there’s a huge dynamic happening in the market place.” Opens stack was a game changer, affecting the open source, the landscape and the ecosystem.

Looking closely at the IT stack, one could easily notice that, in time, “there’s always an open source alternative that comes in and wins in the long run.”

“In the cloud world, the de facto open source model is open stack, gaining major significant momentum with every vendor behind it, including VMware; [it] has been adopted not only by the service providers, but also by Enterprises,” said Jackson.

Open stack and hybrid clouds enable businesses to run their workloads where they are most effective — on either the public or private cloud, on dedicated servers or a combination of these platforms. Rackspace is a leading provider of hybrid clouds, and Rick Jackson mentioned having some top 50 Fortune clients that are looking at “taking their next gen applications into open stack.”

Watch Jackson’s full interview here:

 

“The beauty of open stack is that it is a modular framework. You can plug in different technologies and it is designed to inter-operate with them. By definition open stack will create a very large ecosystem, and that’s ultimately going to be needed for its long-term success,” said Jackson. He adds, “It is obvious that it’s going to be an open source alternative. It happens in every layer of the stack, and open stack it’s proven to be a de facto leader. You simply can’t ignore it, and you have to embrace it.”

Dave Vellante, Chief Analyst with Wikibon, had a couple of comments on the matter as well: “People have seen the effects of open source, and, on the long run it does win, but you got to have a strategy to embrace, as embracing alone doesn’t necessarily ensure your success.”

There are people that believe open stack community should embrace Amazon’s AWS APIs, but Rick Jackson is not one of them. “Open stack is about community innovation, and that’s one of the value propositions of the open source, that so many different people in different organizations can contribute to the ongoing innovation behind that technology. If open stack relegates itself to be an AWS compatible cloud, all that potential innovation is put in the hands of Amazon, and we can only innovate as fast as Amazon innovates. It’s like trusting only one company with all the innovation that’s going to happen in the cloud area.”

He explained further, “Every time we had a major technology shift (moving from mainframe to client server and then to cloud), it was all developed in an open source environment and using open source technologies. Infrastructure is there just to keep things up and running, innovation needs to take place at the higher levels.”

Rackspace hosts one of the largest VMware environments, operating the largest OpenStack-based cloud, and has been recognized by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company.