FICO recently transitioned from legacy to OpenStack. And, according to Nick Gerasimatos, director of engineering and Cloud services at FICO, “Everything is growing so rapidly, you either have to embrace the technology or the technology is going to supersede you.”

Gerasimatos spoke to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s production team, during OpenStack Summit 2015 in Vancouver.

FICO’s agressive adoption model

“We adopted it aggressively,” said Gerasimatos when asked how FICO made the transition to OpenStack. FICO’s timeframe from zero to a fully functioning solution was just 12 months.

“What we needed to do was to become a little more agile as we were going global, so that pushed us to go toward the more OpenStack design,” he said. Gerasimatos credits FICO’s close relationship with Red Hat, Inc. as being mutually beneficial.

‘Don’t be afraid; embrace it!’

Gerasimatos sees the benefits of OpenStack as the low point of entry, scalability, software-defined networking and storage without having to pay the penalties. He lists problems encountered during the transition, including how the FICO operations team struggled to get their heads around the distributed scale-out design, as well as difficulties finding qualified engineers with open-source experience. But despite the challenges getting up and going, Gerasimatos said that FICO is very happy with open source and encourages others to follow in the company’s footsteps.

“Everyone is learning as they go along,” he stated. “Every major company, even including Microsoft, is embracing containers and the new scale-out design architecture. I would say don’t be afraid; embrace it!”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of OpenStack Summit Vancouver 2015.

Photo by SilconANGLE