The cloud market has grown exponentially, both in terms of actual revenues and in terms of cloud-washing. While many industry and Wall Street analysts peg AWS revenues at ~$2 billion (with forecasts of many multiples of that in the near-term), equally many firms are re-focusing their business plans to target the tremendous change in the IT market. Without a doubt, the IT market is undergoing a dramatic shift in its make-up as well as its “food chain”, and the ultimate impact on all market players will be significant. But despite many prognostications and soap-box rants, the verdict is still pending on who “wins”, who “loses” and who “disappears”; we are just too early into this IT shift. The cloud market, while measured in the billions and experiencing huge growth, remains a small fraction of the hundreds-of-billions of dollars that CIOs spend on software, services, hardware and support annually. And this fact is EXCITING!!
How we get from today to the future that everyone is planning for will require a tremendous amount of work, and brings about tremendous opportunity. As these hundreds-of billions-of-IT-dollars move to cloud-based equivalents, managing these workloads will become mission-critical putting cloud management on par with how CIOs label their mission-critical applications. Some industry visionaries foresaw this need over three years ago, and we are now celebrating the third birthday of the most innovative and far-reaching cloud management stack – OpenStack. But despite its youth, many name-brand companies are using OpenStack to manage their production cloud environments (yes, production, run-the-business applications!).
With OpenStack, our industry benefits from an open-source software platform for managing any cloud resource that is based on the contributions of a collective community with 10,000+ members and more than 1,200 code contributors. This breadth of expertise and market involvement is what is needed to ensure a platform that will support CIOs needs for hybrid clouds and the mission-critical management of all their cloud-based IT workloads. The extent of this task cannot be solved by any single-vendor proprietary solution.
At Nuage Networks, we are firmly committed to inter-working with OpenStack via a plug-in for the Neutron service module, and we are actively working with Red Hat to certify our plug-in with its OpenStack platform. Our focus is on enabling the full flexibility of networks to support hybrid clouds via our Virtualized Services Platform, and we believe with Red Hat and OpenStack, we are helping build cloud platforms that can support the hundreds-of-billions-of-IT-dollars that CIOs spend annually.
So Happy Birthday OpenStack, and we look forward to many, many more!