Way back in December 2008 Digg hosted a developer event in San Franciso for the ‘Open Stack’ project, (it was two words back then), which had the goal of making an ‘Open Web’, as the phrase was back then, possible. Neither the name ‘OpenStack’ nor the use of open source as an approach is new!
So it’s all about clouds, but by definition that means its all about the web! I might not go so far as the statement by Gary Edwards on his blog where he claims ‘the battle for the open web is taking place’, but I would like to make the connection a little clearer since it does clarify things in a manner that makes it easier to grasp, and make decisions around.
That’s not to say the piece parts aren’t good, in fact its arguable with NASA’s Nebula Cloud Computing Platform at the centre there is the potential for a real best of breed approach taking shape here.
(Actually I should point out that Intel, AMD and Dell are all signed up as well, but again they are piece part providers in this definition). So with that thought in mind look again at the OpenStack announcement and the participating companies led by RackSpace, a services vendor, and if it wasn’t for NASA it is all distinctly the piece part players. In contrast the role of the existing IT is to create a centralised enterprise managed environment.Ī good definition of ‘front office’ comes from the Business Dictionary Marketing, sales, and service departments that come in direct contact with the customers, and liaise with the back-office (administrative) departments to maintain a two-way flow of information.Įach of the major technology vendors is trying to make the migration path up the stack the way to go, whereas the new technology vendors, much more frequently XaaS services providers, are taking ‘share’ in the new front office space and offering integration down the stack. This is the fundamental issue to grasp and make decisions around the top of the stack is focussed on browser / web technologies driven by users to work in different ways in the so called ‘front office’, introducing a decentralised ‘pay on demand’ environment. Its all to do with the term ‘stack’ where each of the major vendors has tried to produce a complete vertical stack of technologies that are integrated to connect the traditional IT data centric applications and systems at the bottom of the stack with the user centric interactions around services at the top of the stack. So the first thing to consider about this announcement is the lack of the major vendors, and that includes even IBM, the big supporter of open source. The lack of clarity and straightforward information sources is what drives my blogs on the topic at the moment we are in the hype cycle with each major vendor trying to position their approach as a winning definition for the market as a whole on the basis of market share and take up creating a ‘winner takes all’ situation. Add NASA into it and you have the hope that these guys really know what they are doing – there is a joke there somewhere about rocket science – and maybe its all going to make sense. Anything with the tags ‘Clouds’ and ‘Open Source’ gets attention as working CIOs and IT departments grapple with what the technology industry tells them is their future. When NASA decided to join forces with RackSpace to announce the start of an open source cloud project under the name of OpenStack it was a natural headline grabber.
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