OpenStack is at a crossroads. Already in its fourth year, the project is hailed by supporters as a private cloud alternative to AWS without the lock-in, but there remain significant gaps between vision and reality. In particular, the lack of coherent leadership has led to fragmentation in the ecosystem, spawning a dizzying array of largely disparate components most companies aren’t able – or for that matter willing – to cobble together on their own.

David Cahill of SolidFire, a Colorado-based maker of all-flash arrays for cloud data centers, believes that the solution lies within the community: he sees adoption accelerating as vendors continue to commercialize OpenStack with solutions that leverage only the parts that effectively address the use case at hand. Rackspace cloud architect Ken Hui shares the same view.

“What I often talk about with customers is, differentiate between OpenStack the project and the products that are built using the OpenStack project code,” Hui detailed in an interview on theCUBE at last week’s VTUG Winter Warmer 2014 summit at Gillette Stadium. “The project itself can be a bit raw and doesn’t necessarily have the pieces today that you’d want in a full deployment. But a lot of vendors like Rackspace, but also like Red Hat, assigned to package things, take that raw project open source code and productize and wrap other tools around it to make it more production ready.”

The modulization of OpenStack is bringing the ecosystem a step closer towards crossing the chasm into the enterprise mainstream, but it’s still a bumpy road ahead. According to Cahill, the platform will have to be made more accessible to the traditional enterprise through automation in order to advance to the next phase of growth.

See Cahill and Hui’s entire segment below: