Some would call OpenStack the Linux of its day, empowering the likes of Dell, Hewlett Packard and many others to compete with hyperscale cloud providers now gaining traction.  The open source sector is paving the way for public cloud offerings to survive the enterprise market, and OpenStack’s growing ecosystem remains a pivot point amidst this IT transformation. But the restructuring of enterprise IT architecture doesn’t come without a cost, and there’s many questions looming over the open source community.  Gathering to debate the opportunity for OpenStack in the enterprise, a forum is being held  at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA on January 29, 2014, from 3:00 – 7:00PM.

This half-day event will be the first of its kind to bring focus to the conversations surrounding OpenStack’s angling for the enterprise market, and theCUBE will be there to capture and broadcast the day’s most exciting moments.  Tune in here, or to SiliconANGLE.tv for the live show.

At the event, attendees will be able to gain a better understanding of the current state and direction of OpenStack, hear about the strengths and key gaps of OpenStack, understand use cases and best practices from customers who have already deployed OpenStack in its environments, and a lot more.

Hear from industry leaders such as OpenStack Executive Director Jonathan Bryce, Solinea CTO Ken Pepple, Internap SVP of Technology Raj Dutt, Nebula Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Chris C. Kemp, and SolidFire CEO and Founder Dave Wright talk about OpenStack.

Attendees should register before January 24, 2014 as there is limited seating for the conference.

Battle for the enterprise

Currently, AWS is the leader in public cloud but many industry leaders believe that OpenStack will be gaining traction this year.  Both camps are making a play for the enterprise sector, still leary of public cloud solutions due to security gaps, configuration needs and software capabilities.

“Eventually, OpenStack will attract more users than other public offers in multi-cloud environments, and we believe that the first step for this to happen is for public clouds to become more open and available starting in 2014,” Nick Barcet, the vice president of products at OpenStack specialist eNovance, predicts.

And with OpenStack Platform 4.0, distribution platform that is specifically designed for powering open cloud environment, traditional vendors will be able to push back against the public cloud making it easier for this group of open source renegades to overthrow rivals.  OpenStack’s partnership strategy is also an important component, as one analyst points out.

“We have been tracking the evolution of OpenStack since its early days and were initially encouraged by the strong support within the developer community. Importantly, OpenStack is now becoming strategic with adoption from big name enterprise customers like Fidelity and eBay/PayPal,” said David Vellante, co-host at theCUBE and chief research officer at Wikibon.org. “Customers today want cloud-like capabilities that solve problems, provide choice and are open. With more than 100 companies driving innovation, the OpenStack community has the potential to deliver these capabilities and become a leader in infrastructure management for decades to come.”

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