Insight

Open for business

InsightIT is heading towards being something more akin to a utility service, transformed by OpenStack’s open standardised cloud architecture, which will improve interoperability and render vendor lock-in a thing of the past.

Initially a solution adopted by smaller ISVs lacking the capital to build private clouds, OpenStack-based cloud solutions are shaping up to be the logical choice for large enterprise as industry leaders, including IBM, Cisco, EMC, HP and Oracle bet on its value for defining the next-generation model for business computing.

These industry giants have been snatching up OpenStack-based companies over the past couple of years, building up their capabilities around the architecture. IBM and Cisco are some of the latest to close deals, with their respective acquisitions of Blue Box and Piston Cloud Computing. Other relevant acquisitions include EMC’s purchase of Cloudscaling, Oracle’s Nimbula acquistion, and Cisco’s MetaCloud acquisition.

OpenStack’s value for business lies in its capacity for facilitating seamless private-to-public scalability and extensive workload portability, while removing the need to lay out capital to acquire and maintain depreciating commodity hardware.

These companies see that innovations in open clouds will inevitably win out as the premier solution for business data management. The days of commodity hardware and internally managed data centres are rapidly fading. With cloud services available on a pay-as-you-go basis and infrastructure as a service removing the need to invest in commodity hardware, customers will look at performance, pricing and quality of service as the most important factors in choosing a cloud provider, while maintaining the freedom to easily switch if a better option comes along.

OpenStack’s core strength is interoperability, allowing for seamless scaling across private and public environments, as well as easier transition and connectivity across vendors and networks.

Companies like IBM and Cisco buying up OpenStack-based providers to bolster their own hybrid cloud solutions does not mean the architecture will lose touch with its open-source roots. Open standards and interoperability go hand-in-hand and are at the heart of OpenStack’s unique capabilities.

What we are seeing is the maturation of OpenStack, with major names in business computing positioned to mainstream its adoption by leveraging their financial, IP, R&D resources and brand trust to meet complex demands and ensure confidence from large enterprise organisations transitioning to the cloud.

Cisco listed OpenStack’s capabilities for enhancing automation, availability and scale for hybrid clouds as playing a major role in its new Intercloud Network, while HP is utilising OpenStack to facilitate its vendor-neutral Helion Network, which will pool the services of Helion partners to offer global workload portability for customers of vendors within their network.

Cisco recently added new functionalities for its Intercloud offering, extending virtual machine on-boarding to support Amazon Virtual Private Cloud and extending its zone-based firewall services to include Microsoft Azure. Last year, IBM partnered with software and cloud competitor Microsoft, each offering their respective enterprise software across both Microsoft Azure and the IBM Cloud to help reduce costs and spur development across their platforms for their customers. OpenStack furthers these capabilities across the quickly expanding list of providers adapting the cloud architecture, enabling a vendor-agnostic market for software solutions.

Open standardised cloud architecture is the future of business IT, and OpenStack currently stands as the best and only true solution to make it happen. Its development was spurred by demand from small ISVs who will continue to require its capabilities and promote its development, regardless of whether large enterprise service providers are on board.

Its inevitable development and obvious potential for enterprise is to conform. Regardless if they’d prefer to maintain the status quo for their customers, the progress we’ve seen won’t be undone and the path toward vendor neutrality has been set.

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