As organizations strive to make open source and OpenStack more manageable for users, experts, developers and marketers are called in to advise. But one player in open technology has found that there is an excellent R&D source available to them for free: the users themselves; their likes and gripes; and what they would like to see introduced next.

Kim Bannerman, program director of Advocacy and Community at Blue Box, an IBM company, spoke to John Furrier (@furrier), cohost of the theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the IBM Open Cloud Architecture Summit about how customer Proof of Concepts (PoCs) are helping them finetune products and services.

“Our advocate team is great,” she said. “We really go out and listen — we are the customer advocate — and we bring back the types of things they want to see in the roadmap or the types of things they’d love to be able to play with and do.”

As-a-Service to the rescue

Bannerman said that she’s seen a lot of companies try to work the OpenStack at scale all by themselves, and time and time again, they have failed. She said that Blue Box offers OpenStack management and services that take the bulk of the complexity off of the customers’ hands.

She gave the example of a gaming company that couldn’t manage the OpenStack themselves, so it came to Blue Box. “They wanted to be in OpenStack without having to be a cloud company,” she said.

On the horizon

When asked what projects she is most excited about now, Bannerman said, “I really love what we’re doing with the IBM container engine. I learned more about it at DockerCon than I’d ever known before, so I’m really curious to see what our customers think.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Open Cloud Architecture Summit.

Photo by SiliconANGLE