As we are wrapping up this week’s #openstacksummit, it has become clear that much of the purpose behind the event is to shore up the OpenStack brand from both a business and technological perspective. Joining SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Stu Miniman to discuss this, the ascendance of the DevOps culture and why transitioning to a fully open source environment will still leave room for specialty houses in the Enterprise was the CEO of Dreamhost, Simon Anderson.

OpenStack, still in what many believe to be its early days, is taking this time to ensure they are minding their P’s and Q’s in terms of development and maturity in a responsible manner. As Anderson noted, “It’s getting to a point where the OpenStack brand can be applied to both hardware and software.” He continued by saying that the work done by the Foundation is building confidence going forward that any OpenStack branded product will work and work well. “It’s about building trust in the brand,” he said.

Confidence in the brand is going to be essential in the coming several months, too. While large corporations like Disney and Wells Fargo have made clear their support for OpenStack, other companies seem to be taking a wait and see approach. Anderson, citing the early days of AWS, is not disheartened by this fact, however.

Watch the interview in its entirety here:

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Turning the topic to the shifting dominance of the DevOps culture in the industry, Furrier stated, “This is a DevOps show. But not every company can have a DevOps ninja.” He then asked what the future holds for the industry.

“I think the Enterprise is actually embracing the DevOps culture,” Anderson said. While a DevOps ninja might not look to the Enterprise like a reliable person to hire into their organization, many companies are realizing the value that their particular skillsets can bring to the entire team. “[DevOps] have to think beyond their own code, understanding how it will interact with the overall platform,” he said.

The import for the Enterprise is to work DevOps practitioners into their corporate scheme. “You have to have a lot of process,” explained Anderson. “Aiming for agility doesn’t mean you can work outside of that process,” he suggested. “Enterprise needs to understand that moving at the speed of light still means you have to understand and work within limitations. It’s the meeting of those two worlds.”

Operationalizing the enterprise shift towards open source

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Enterprise will continue their shift to open source and Open Stack as more and more of the complexities are abstracted away via automation advancements. “On the operations side, we see how Puppet and Swift have transformed a lot,” Anderson stated. “We used to develop ways to script out. Now there is software that is coming up that allows the DevOps team to spend less time working on that. They can work in more complex issues.”

Anderson then began to wax poetic about open source being far grander than merely a technology mindset. “I think open source is not just about software,” he began. “It is a way of doing business that I think is starting to permeate.” He explained how running your entire operation on the open source model yields benefit to the organization almost immediately. “When you put things out there to your team and do so in a way that is consumable,” he said, “you get good feedback, earlier buy-in and less resistance later.”

This movement to a wider embrace of an open source philosophy led Furrier to inquire how, in the future, Enterprise would arrive at procurement decisions being that everyone would be offering their products as open source.

“Enterprise will always have their specific requirements,” Anderson stated. “The Cloud offers the flexibility and the agility to compete.” This, he noted, is important because big Enterprise is no longer on an exclusive field with other large Enterprise competitors. “Start ups that are starting at zero and getting to $1 billion in no time are now big competitors,” he said. “I think that is what open source offers. OpenStack and other open source collaborations are focused not only on agility but also solving those security and reliability issues that are essential for large-scale Enterprise acceptance.”

That acceptance, he proffers, is going to be realized and realized soon. “I think in any transformation that is technology related there is a tipping point that happens,” Anderson explained. “The reason we are trying to make [OpenStack] a viable platform is to push it to the tipping point.” Backing up a position Furrier has staked out several times this week, Anderson went on to say, “I don’t think anything is going to stop it now. The train has left the station.” Summing up his faith in the platform, Anderson concluded, “OpenStack is the holy grail.”

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