In their wrap-up of day two’s live coverage from this year’s OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, GA theCUBE co-hosts Stu Miniman and John Furrier reviewed their learnings from the day’s interviews and offered predictions about trends to watch as OpenStack matures in the coming years.

Furrier started of by stating that, after today, it’s clear to him that the OpenStack ship has sailed. The technology has found momentum and built a solid foundation, but hasn’t progressed to the point where it’s “a shot heard around the world.” For Furrier, OpenStack is still in the Kool-aid stage, but, he stated, “the trough of disillusionment is coming.”

Miniman agreed with Furrier, noting that there still hasn’t been “some big announcement, some big acquisition.” Instead, everything the co-hosts have been seeing this week has been about momentum: “many people are contributing code, the users are getting involved, and the big vendors are really starting to put the wood behind the arrow. ”

Where’s the business models? Revenue?

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Stressing that CIOs are paying attention to OpenStack now, but that the conversation needs to be around how OpenStack is penetrating different industries and use cases, Miniman stated the need to examine “where is this getting out? Where are the new business models being created by companies using this? Where is revenue happening?”

Furrier picked up this thread, adding that one of the trends he’s noticed is that total cost of ownership (TCO) is still undefined. While Furrier added that the lack of definition is not unexpected, as OpenStack is still an emerging market, he pointed out that even talking about TCO indicates that the OpenStack industry is building legitimacy.

In addition, Miniman pointed out that “it’s the operational efficiencies that drive OpenStack.”

A potential customer can refresh their storage and my choose OpenStack because it’s a cool, new technology that companies can buy in a box, and it’s faster and cheaper. This operational cost, while difficult to measure, is where Miniman believes cloud and OpenStack offer the most value.

Continuing the discussion on the current status of OpenStack, Furrier mentioned that “operationalizing new stuff is always a challenge, and that is a tell-tale sign that you’re not yet in the trough of disillusionment.” When OpenStack emerges from the trough of disillusionment, Furrier explained, that’s when businesses will really see an advance in operationalizing because that’s when real growth will start.

OpenStack still faces obstacles

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Furrier touched on another trend he’d noticed at the conference, seamless consumption. He mentioned that in the interview with HP, they’d mentioned off-camera that their plan was to make OpenStack “as seamless to consume as possible,” meaning that HP will “go end-to-end and provide all that automation so [OpenStack] is not hard to acquire.” This what, as Furrier mention, Saar Gillai of HP called eliminating inhibitors. “Creating a frictioneless environment,” Furrier observed, “is key.”

Miniman agreed with him, resting the question as “How do we create that automation and orchestration layer that will help simplify everything happening at the infrastructure layer?”

Next, theCUBE co-hosts shifted focus to discuss how practitioners handle the challenges of the OpenStack landscape. Furrier brought up their interview with Alessandro Perilli of Red Hat, and how he sees their relationship with Cloud Foundry as welcome competition.

Miniman also noted that his favorite moment in the Perilli interview was one in which the interviewee embraced the difficulties he needed to surmount; Miniman recounted the story Perilli told: He met with VP of infrastructure and said, “I have so many challenges right now, it’s so exciting.” Miniman stressed that he believes that IT companies need to embrace new models and branch out beyond their current system.

Next, Furrier expressed his concern that OpenStack could “go off the rails,” if tugged in too many different directions: “weird agendas, getting forked.” This was one aspect of OpenStack that he was looking for in particular this week, wondering, “What are these big guys going to do? Chip away at the momentum to pull it back onto their terms?”

Miniman drew parallels between Furrier’s concerns for OpenStack and the maturation of Linux. Although anyone can download Linux, “most customers are going to take some distribution because they need the packaging and support and sometimes there are extra things they want on top of it.” Although the two products are very different, Miniman predicts a similar process of maturation.

OpenStack strengths

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After sharing his concerns, Furrier moved on to what he believes are some of the strengths of OpenStack. He cited the interview with Guillaume Aubuchon of DigitalFilm Tree, a company he described as an “OK” customer for OpenStack, but one he found exciting due of the nature of their enterprise: “Cutting-edge software development as a creative shop in the film industry.”

Furrier explained that this type of innovation is what makes him excited that “the next young gun is going to come from this generation of digital natives.” Miniman echoed Furrier’s appreciation for the DigitalFilm Tree interview, explaining that he admired how Aubuchon dove into software development to create new business.

Miniman added, though, that his favorite interview had been with Cloudcast. The co-hosts joked about the friendly “rivalry” between the two tech news sources.

The next interview they discussed was their conversation with Saar Gillai. Furrier explained that he appreciated Gillai because of his history with OpenStack at HP, where he “laid down the rails” and how despite his major role, Gillai isn’t much of a grandstander. At the same time, Furrier expressed his excitement that Gillai reiterated to theCUBE that HP plans to spend “a billion dollars” on OpenStack.

Continuing the discussion on movers and shakers, Miniman brought up their earlier interview with Dave Wright from SolidFire. He was particularly excited about their new converged infrastructure solution for OpenStack, an effort that was released without much marketing bravado. Miniman emphasized that he’s curious as to when EMC and CISCO, leaders in that space, are going to “jump in,” because both Google and Oracle have a presence at the OpenStack Summit. Miniman noted, “there’s a lot of interesting things going on behind the scenes here.”

Another trend that Furrier mentioned watching is Big Data challenges, which he brought up in relation with theCUBE interview with Jean-Luc Chatelain, with whom Furrier agrees that OpenStack Summit is a DevOps show.

Chatelain also laid out some of the big data challenges that OpenStack will have to face in the near future: “the bigger data, the bigger privacy headings, the bigger the data, the bigger the security risks.”

Furrier also mentioned keeping his eye on PureStorage, which Chatelain does not believe will be the next EMC. To conclude, both co-hosts expressed their appreciation for the conference. Miniman commented, “It’s fun to get together with this crowd. The geeks party well.”