OpenStack Summit October 2015 Tokyo

In the early days of OpenStack—think Diablo and Essex—smart people had a great idea: let’s simplify OpenStack consumption by offering a choice in between the polar opposites of build it yourself (DIY) and a Rackspace account.

And thus, the OpenStack software distribution was born. Startups and legacy IT shops spent the next 4 years trying to convince a skeptical market that distros were the way to go, but it hasn’t worked out. With a couple of exceptions, distros are vanishing from the competitive landscape.

In this session, we’ll look at what happened. We’ll examine the reasons why very few enterprises want to learn or operate OpenStack, but remain hungry to *consume* it. We’ll ask why most enterprise buyers want OpenStack without having to touch OpenStack. We’ll look at the mindset of enterprises that “get” agile and realize their success rests solely on differentiation through application innovation, not through an investment in infrastructure and operations. Finally, we’ll look at some of the places where innovation is happening in the OpenStack ecosystem and how new business models are emerging.

Attend this session if you agree, disagree or simply want to have an honest conversation about what we can learn from the demise of one of the early favorites in OpenStack business models.