Piston Cloud founding CTO Josh McKenty and Joe Arnold, the CEO of Swiftstack, hopped into theCube at VMworld 2013 to share their insights into the OpenStack ecosystem.

McKenty says that VMware and Microsoft are competing over client-server workloads, which he perceives as the virtualized equivalents of legacy mainframes. Amazon and OpenStack on the other hand are in a two-horse race for next generation cloud applications, and VMware has no choice but to side with the latter.

Arnold mentions that enterprises are increasingly transitioning from general-purpose tools to point solutions as their IT environments become bigger and more complex. CIOs are also pursuing ways to break out of break out of vendor lock-in, which is exactly what Piston Cloud is offering.

“We have joint customers with basically every ecosystem player, we have customers with Nicira, we also have customers with other network vendors and ditto on the storage side. That really is that freedom that folks are looking for – to be able to mix and match a set of vendors in their data center,” McKenty says. He adds that “the software-defined data center label is a really powerful concept because we’re taking the silos down around storage, compute and networking but we’re not limiting the scope of the vendors and saying ‘OK well because it’s all one set of APIs that doesn’t mean you have to buy from one individual.”

It’s all about the private cloud, according to Arnold. McKenty explains that data has to be stored locally to accommodate data-driven workloads, and notes that open source technologies enable users to take an active role in the development of their platform. He adds that the OpenStack community is considering to add support for Docker, a container engine that offers an alternative to traditional hypervisors.

Click the video below to watch the full interview.