
Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2014. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Boris Renski, co-founder and CMO of Mirantis
Three OpenStack Predictions for 2014
Its the end of the year and everyone is getting into the
fortune-telling business. As an OpenStack insider, I wanted to join the party,
so here are some predictions of my own:
1. Enterprise adoption of OpenStack will take
off
During
the 2011 OpenStack summit, I shared my views on "who will spend money on
OpenStack," depicting the adoption curve as follows:

As we edge closer to 2014 we are seeing increasing interest
in OpenStack from traditional enterprises, so I'm happy to stand by my
prediction of almost two years ago, and I look forward to 2014.
In and of itself predicting increasing enterprise OpenStack
adoption may not be an incredibly "exciting" prediction, but the key use case
behind OpenStack adoption is of far more interest.
Enterprises want the ability to perform software engineering
by Web 2.0 standards. In other words, enterprises want to have an integrated
DevOps environment which allows for the faster movement of features from
development to production. I won't go into much more detail here, but this
blog about PayPal's use of OpenStack and my
webcast with Webex illustrate my thoughts. In short, OpenStack is essential
to enterprises reaching their development goals because it is the only solution
that allows one to federate diverse infrastructure pools into a single,
integrated cloud environment. The desire of enterprises to liberate their
infrastructure from vendor lock-in and to take greater advantage of their
existing infrastructure investments is what will propel OpenStack ahead of the
alternatives.
2. OpenStack-native PaaS will become real
There was some controversy in the infrastructure industry
resulting from our
speculation earlier this year that OpenStack will eventually produce a native
PaaS solution threatening the likes of Cloud Foundry and OpenShift. Yet
shortly after our speculation, project Solum - a native PaaS for OpenStack - was
launched. No worries, "Solum
is Golum" the community said. Well, it appears that
Solum is the most actively discussed OpenStack-related project on
stackforge, with Rackspace, IBM, Red Hat, DreamHost, AT&T, HP and others
all actively participating.
This is not surprising, a native PaaS solution is critical
to the "integrated DevOps environment" I mentioned in my first prediction.
Indeed, not only is OpenStack-native PaaS here to stay (and displace Cloud
Foundry and Openshift), but it will play a key role in propelling OpenStack
towards mainstream enterprise adoption. Without it, OpenStack in the enterprise
is a solution in search of a problem.
3. The OpenStack ecosystem will be rearranged
My
final prediction is that we'll start seeing signs of rearrangement and
consolidation in the OpenStack ecosystem. Some companies will get acquired,
while some others will get acqui-hired.
It's been three years since OpenStack became sexy and investors started pouring
money into OpenStack startups, and now some of those startups are running out
of steam.
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About the Author
Boris is responsible for helping define Mirantis’ strategic vision and executing on it in the marketplace across the OpenStack ecosystem and beyond. Boris’ influence was instrumental in Mirantis’ current focus on open source infrastructure and applications solutions and services. He serves on the Board of Directors the OpenStack Foundation.