After trotting out some impressive enterprise users at its conference in Portland, Oregon, early last year, OpenStack hasn’t been able to showcase many additional big names. Supporters tried to address “the debate about the opportunity for OpenStack in the enterprise” at a half-day conference yesterday that was held at the Computer History Museum and webcast.
The speakers ended up highlighting a few of the challenges holding back OpenStack deployments.
Many businesses are looking for the kind of enterprise technology product that they’re used to seeing, and that’s not what OpenStack looks like yet, said Ken Pepple, CTO and founder of Solinea, a consulting company that helps businesses implement OpenStack clouds. On one end of the spectrum are vendors that are packaging parts of OpenStack and adding support. On the other are tightly packed solutions that go as far as designating what hardware to use. “People want something in between. They want pretty installers and great looking GUIs. They want some management tools around it, things you normally see perhaps in an ERP system,” he said.
