When Bailey Caldwell, Vice President of Business Development at Rightscale, stopped by theCUBE at the OpenStack to talk with co-hosts John Furrier and David Floyer, he made no bones about it: the hybrid model is emerging. Both private and public clouds and the ability to interact across both is the hand they’re betting on. Rightscale saw early on that the cloud was going to need management tools and there wasn’t going to be just one cloud. Caldwell explained it as: multiple resource pools, and being able to run your application across all of those pools.

What we see is a hybrid model emerging where Enterprises what to build cloud-like services for their IT organization. The public cloud has allowed the business to innovative really rapidly, and there is no reason that IT can’t provide those same services using technologies like OpenStack.

He highlights an interesting point that Rightscale is seeing: that it’s becoming more difficult to differentiate between an internal IT organization’s role and a cloud provider’s role. Innovative IT, or Enterprise IT organizations are becoming, what he calls, travel agents. Between governance, price and facilitation of the public resource pools, that analogy might not be far off. Rightscale focuses on what you do after the cloud is built. That focus is apps and data you need to run the infrastructure. Above the cloud is where Rightscale is making sure #OpenStack can scale.

Data has mass, and moving it is difficult. Ultimately, the software and IT world is going to be further and further commoditized. But more importantly, data, Big Data, is transactional. And with so much transactional Big Data, the closer you can move the data to the processing tools, the better. A great point brought up by Caldwell is that while the cloud is a great innovation in software, the majority of software and the majority of the processing tools are not cloud. Is the value of moving those to the cloud substantial enough to warrant the move? He isn’t sold yet.

Furrier asked Caldwell, like all of the other guests at #OpenStackSummit on theCUBE, what infrastructure as code meant to him. “Software’s ability to interact with infrastructure is the future of software development…Why do I need an ops guy to determine I need more cpu when the app itself can take advantage of those resources and spin it up and provision it on its own…It means turning the could into a computer. Making it as programmable as the hardware in this laptop.”

All in all, software, the cloud, #OpenStack and computing in general are all about the users. The #OpenStack Summit really thrives on that mantra.