SiliconAngle founding CEO John Furrier and co-host Jeff Frick brought us up to speed on the OpenStack Summit and the state of the cloud in a Monday introductory segment, courtesy of the theCube.

Frick starts the discussion by noting that while OpenStack has come a long way since the first Summit in 2008, the technology is still relatively new to the market. This is indeed the case, but Furrier points out that the platform brings a lot to the table nonetheless: traditional enterprises, service providers and telecos have started the transition from proprietary hardware and commercial software, a combo known as scale-up architecture, to a scale-out approach that’s based on low cost servers and free software. OpenStack is playing a key role in this shift.

Furrier believes that this week’s Summit in Portland marks the first time the industry hit a scale-out “flashpoint”. In response to the growing demand, IBM Cisco, VMware and other major vendors have setup booths next to upstarts such as HortonWorks and SolidFire.

Low cost, high performance computing comes in many forms. While data center vendors are putting their weight behind open-source, Amazon is also growing its presence in the enterprise with AWS. Furrier refers to this rivalry as the “cloud wars”.

“Amazon has owned what we call the “shadow IT market”, people are going to Amazon and running stuff under the table, running stuff out in the public cloud. But when you talk to the top guys they don’t want to put their stuff out on Amazon…they want security, so Amazon is addressing that,” Furrier says. “All CIOs I talked to and all the top IT architects say ‘we will go to cloud,’ what cloud will look like no one really knows yet. The whole focus here… is that OpenStack hopes to provide the tools so that they don’t have to reinvent everything.”
See John and Jeff’s entire segment below: