It's official: the cloud is boring. While some of you already felt like cloud was BOA (boring on arrival), the reality is that it's been causing all sorts of headaches within the enterprise. Until now.

As Forrester analyst James Staten suggests, new product announcements from both OpenStack and Microsoft Azure got a muted yawn this past week, which is a Very Good Thing, as he explains:

"[H]o-hum releases like these are signs of maturity that signal to enterprises that it’s now okay to invest. Let’s face it. Most enterprises are conservative. We don’t like to be first with any new, risky technology. That’s why we wait for the 2.1 release before trying something new... We’d like other companies to work all the kinks out of the system, live through all the stability issues and fix all the bugs so we can get a solid release to work with."  

As much as people have tried to hype the cloud over the years, hype is precisely the opposite of what was needed to make cloud mainstream. As such, it's arguably a great sign that cloud is about to surrender the hype crown to Big Data, at least as measured by Google searches (as pointed out by Timo Elliott):

It's about time. As a Unisphere survey (PDF) of Oracle users indicates, cloud is becoming strategic within the enterprise, and much more pervasive. As the survey reveals, 37% of enterprise managers are running or piloting private clouds, which is a jump from 29% two years ago. More significantly, an additional 26%  use public cloud services for enterprise applications, a big boost from 14%. 

This jibes with a new Barclays survey of 100 CIOs, which found them piling into the cloud. Indeed, cloud, second only to Big Data, topped the list of IT spending drivers:

In sum, for years we've known that cloud computing would be big. But that's not what CIOs needed to hear. They needed to know that it could also be boring. We have arrived!

It's happening again. Red Hat, which for years has dominated both the development and monetization of Linux, has turned its code contributing hand to OpenStack, the popular open-source cloud computing project. While Red Hat initially fought OpenStack, today it has become OpenStack's biggest contributor.

This bodes well for Red Hat. And for OpenStack.

Source Code Vs. Source Of Code

To understand why, it's important to understand how commercial open source works. In proprietary software, source code matters. A developer or company writes software, locks it up under a proprietary license and sells the right to use the software. Proprietary software licensing attempts to make digital goods sell like physical goods.

But in open source, being the source of the source code matters most. Since open-source developers essentially give away software for free, the key to monetization lies in being known as the source of the code, such that one becomes known as the best source of support, updates and add-on components for the software in question. 

Red Hat has turned this open source development and distribution strategy into more than $1 billion each year in support for Linux, a project that it heavily influences by contributing roughly double what any other vendor contributes, as the Linux Foundation's annual Linux development report states. It may not seem like much, but Red Hat's contribution rate of 11.9% gives it outsized influence with prospective Linux customers. No other vendor is better able to influence the inclusion of customer requirements in the Linux kernel.

Now the same thing seems to be happening in OpenStack.

Red Hat Gets Behind OpenStack

While OpenStack was once controlled almost exclusively by its founder, Rackspace, today Red Hat has taken the lead on contributions to OpenStack:

Source: OpenStack (Data compiled by Bitergia)

Again, Red Hat's contributions double those of the next two largest contributors, Rackspace and IBM. Again, Red Hat's contributions put it in the pole position to profit from an open-source project.

Particularly OpenStack, which has been criticized as being long on community and short on actual deployments. 

Red Hat isn't particularly concerned with winning popularity contests. As a public company, it needs real customers paying real money for real OpenStack deployments. As such, it has released RDO, Red Hat's community distribution of OpenStack (similar to Red Hat's Fedora project for Linux), and this week Red Hat announced the availability of the Red Hat OpenStack Early Adopter Program, which provides early access to its enterprise-grade distribution of OpenStack, similar to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

It's not hard to imagine Red Hat's customer base extending their RHEL, JBoss, and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) deployments to the cloud with Red Hat OpenStack.

Just What OpenStack Needed?

After all, this is the playbook Red Hat perfected with RHEL and has put to use selling middleware, virtualization, and now cloud. While Red Hat's involvement offers no guarantee of success, when Red Hat sticks to markets it knows - enterprise infrastructure - using a business model that fits - enterprise hardening of community code - its success rate is pretty impressive. With $35.5 billion at stake in the cloud market, according to recent Gartner projections, making OpenStack work is a big deal.

Since shifting into a true community project, OpenStack has steadily attracted new, active contributors, Red Hat chief among them. The next phase involves making OpenStack safe for the enterprise. Arguably no company has more success turning open source into a safe investment for CIOs than Red Hat. 

As such, Red Hat being number one in OpenStack contributions may go a long way toward making OpenStack number one with CIOs.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

As much as we don't like markets being dominated by a single vendor, it's almost as bad to try to choose between a chaotic mix of vendors. That's the current state of the cloud market, and it's giving some prospective buyers fits. For public cloud, Amazon is the early leader, but within the enterprise...? It's not so clear.

The major cloud vendors admit as much. In a recent Quora thread, executives from Eucalyptus, VMware and more debate who leads the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud market. Answer? 

It depends.

AWS vs. VMware vs. OpenStack?

Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos starts it off, answering the question of "In the IaaS cloud market, who will win between AWS, VMware and OpenStack?" with:

All three camps have their respective strengths. VMware is the undisputed leader in virtualization and more broadly in on-premise infrastructure software. So far they have little to show when it comes to public clouds. OpenStack has huge popularity and the backing of legacy IT vendors. They are fighting the public cloud and the private cloud battle at the same time. Amazon Web Services are overwhelming leaders in public cloud, an industry that is growing fast. AWS hasn’t done much with large enterprises or on-premise environments. They do have Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Direct Connect (DC), and the partnership with Eucalyptus.

But it's not as if these vendors are operating in a vacuum. As VMware cloud executive Matthew Lodge notes, both AWS and VMware bring existing fan bases (he calls them "power bases") to the cloud party. VMware has an enviable foothold with enterprise IT and AWS owns developers. OpenStack, as Lodge points out, has "undoubted enthusiasm around the project from vendors and early users" but "no strong power base" and still lacks many public clouds built on its technology, and has been particularly slow to gain traction in Europe. 

Cloud Apples vs. Cloud Oranges

Which, of course, is a reminder that at times we're comparing cloud apples and cloud oranges here.

IaaS architect Jason Heiss hones in on this, posing a mock rhetorical question - "In the housing market, who will win between Century 21, Home Depot and a lumber mill?" - and then stressing that each of these cloud providers is "selling different things to different people," concluding "They'll likely all 'win,' in the sense that cloud adoption is still nascent in many companies."

I'm not sure that I agree that all will win, even in Heiss' sense. While the cloud a growing market with lots of room for "winners," enterprises are going to settle on a few vendors, not many. VMware has the "power base" with enterprises, and AWS has the same with developers. Eucalyptus ties the enterprise into the power of AWS through its API, and OpenStack has a great deal of momentum from vendors who want it to succeed against incumbent power bases.

In other words, this game is nowhere near over, and it may be too soon to pick a winner.

Can Any One Vendor Win The Cloud?

And even when we do pick a winner, are we picking a winner in enterprise cloud deployments, public cloud deployments, hybrid cloud deployments, deployments of public clouds built on one's cloud technology, or something else altogether? Defining the market matters, and at present it's not clear that there's any useful way to describe the overall "cloud market" as a coherent thing that any one vendor could possibly win.

So when you read that OpenStack has upended the private cloud market, or read a blow-by-blow account of who's winning between CloudStack or OpenStack, a healthy dose of skepticism may be in order. Not of the analyses, which are often quite good, but rather of the very idea that any particular vendor could win this amorphous market we call "cloud."

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

IBM's decision to throw its considerable weight behind OpenStack has some folks declaring victory for the open source cloud consortium. The hitch? Amazon already claims a considerable lead, with more than 70% of the market, according to Forrester's James Staten, and as one prominent Amazon backer declares, the lead grows daily.

Can Amazon Withstand Sustained Cloud Computing Competition?

The question is whether Amazon can withstand a sustained, concerted attack by nearly everyone else in the cloud computing industry.

So far, according to Adrian Cockroft, director of architecture for Netflix, Amazon Web Services' biggest customer, the answer is an emphatic "Yes." In a Twitter exchange last week, Infoworld's Eric Knorr asked "Is the choice really between OpenStack and AWS? What about other cloud solutions?" Cockroft's response was clear:

@ericknorr that's not the choice. A barrier for people currently using AWS is the feature gap to anything else. OpenStack not closing gap.

— adrian cockcroft (@adrianco) March 14, 2013

When asked which features, in particular, AWS had that OpenStack couldn't match, Cockroft insisted that there is "too much to list," but "Availability Zones and Autoscale Groups" are two features that stand out. Furthermore, Cockroft indicated that OpenStack's six-month release cycle cripples its ability to catch up with Amazon, which rolls out new features (and price drops) on a continuous basis.

In other words, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

Has Amazon Already Won? Yes and No.

But has Amazon already won? If you look at the absolute number of jobs being created, relative to OpenStack or Cloudstack, the answer is yes. Ditto if you go off general interest, as measured by Web searches:

But if you look at relative job growth, suddenly OpenStack has a fighting chance.

Perhaps even more tellingly, a foray into the code contributions for OpenStack suggest a truly dynamic, growing entity, one that is no longer Rackspace's pet project, but rather a true community effort. The most recent data I could find is a year old, but already shows growing influence by Red Hat and others.

Does this matter? Absolutely.

Big Players Will Make A Big Difference

However, I suspect that OpenStack will gain prominence in tandem with a few of its primary supporters gaining outsized influence due to these code contributions. Linux took off as IBM invested $1 billion (and then much more) and Red Hat, in particular, invested armies of engineers to make it into an enterprise-grade operating system standard.

The same will hold true of OpenStack. Right now it's making waves by being the open, community standard. That's nice, but insufficient and somewhat misleading, as Gartner's Kyle Hilgendorf has established. Ultimately, enterprises don't care about community and openness unless the product itself is rock solid.

Which is one reason that Microsoft and Google also can't be counted out. Microsoft holds sway with CIOs, and has been actively welcoming open-source technologies to its Azure cloud service. Google, for its part, was building clouds long before it was cool, and has so many hooks into developers with its various software and services, from Android to Maps to YouTube to Apps, that it cannot help but be a major player. Google Compute Engine's performance compares well against Amazon, too, but it's the ease developers will have tying into Google's services that truly favor it.

Has Amazon won Round 1 of the Public Cloud wars? No question. But some serious competitors are looming, each with attributes (Microsoft, enterprise fealty; OpenStack, community; Google, popular developer services) that give them a real chance to cut into Amazon's significant lead.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

With IBM tossing its might behind OpenStack, the open source software used to run cloud-computing installations is in a strong position to become the dominant platform in the industry.

OpenStack Rising

IBM announced Monday that it will make OpenStack the foundation of its cloud services and software. In backing the open source project, Big Blue joined other tech heavyweights behind the technology, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Cisco, Red Hat and Rackspace.

"IBM is the big fish in the sea and for them to make the level of commitment that they did today is a big deal," said James Staten, analyst for Forrester Research. "That's the kind of heft OpenStack needs."

The announcement is likely to send OpenStack's two main competitors VMware and CloudStack, another open source cloud computing platform, into a battle for second place.

“OpenStack has won the race to become the standard, and it has done it rapidly,” Ann Winblad, a venture capitalist and a managing director of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, told AllThingsD.

IBM And Open Source

IBM has conducted a long love affair with open source software. In 2000, it backed Linux and a year later committed $1 billion to the development of the operating system. IBM's support helped drive Linux into large organizations and made it a viable competitor against Microsoft as a server platform.

"IBM could have the same impact on OpenStack as it did on the Linux world," Staten said.

IBM recognized years ago that open source code fit its business strategy a lot better than proprietary technology. The company draws most of its $100 billion in annual revenue from providing IT services. By basing a lot of its own technology on the code from various open source projects, as well as industry standards, IBM is able to work its hardware and software into what enterprise types call "heterogeneous computing environments" — the combinations of patched-together technology from a variety of vendors typically found in large companies, the segment of the tech market IBM is strongest.

"IBM has really great credibility in the open source community," Gary Chen, analyst for International Data Corp., said. "They really do understand open source."

IBM's First OpenStack Product

IBM followed its announcement with the introduction of its first OpenStack-based product, SmartCloud Orchestrator. SmartCloud is the brand name for IBM's platform for running cloud installations in customers' or IBM's data centers or in a combination of both. Orchestrator is a service customers use to configure the computing, storage and networking resources for cloud applications.

One unanswered question is how IBM will integrate its current SmartCloud code base with OpenStack. In an interview with NetworkWorld, Robert LeBlanc, a senior vice president of software for IBM, waxed mystical in describing how Big Blue will handle the transition.

"We're on a continual journey," LeBlanc said. "But we think this is a major step in that journey."

Cloud Standards

IBM clearly wants to influence OpenStack's technological direction and efforts to develop industry standards for cloud computing, which is still a relatively immature architecture. IBM has formed a 400-member Cloud Standards Customer Council to help push other tech vendors in a direction favorable to IBM. The company says it has more than 5,000 customers running private clouds on its platform.

IBM is also a major player in standards bodies, such as the World Wide Web Consortium and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).

While standards are key to making different technologies work together, they won't help companies make the cultural changes necessary to adopt cloud computing and make it work. Delivering applications as a Web service dramatically changes the role of IT departments and affects how employees interact with software, too.

Because of its success in professional services, IBM is in a strong position to help companies make those cultural changes, but it won't be easy. "A lot of enterprises are not ready to hear it," Staten said.

Nevertheless, the momentum in the tech industry is behind cloud computing. The public cloud service market alone is expected to grow 18.5% this year to $131 billion worldwide.

With that much money on the table, IBM plans to become a major player in the market and is betting that OpenStack can help it achieve that goal.

Image courtesy of ShutterStock

Remember SUSE? Way back when it was the cutting-edge Linux distribution, and held its own with Red Hat. But that was a long time ago, long before Microsoft adopted it as its pet and Attachmate took it over as part of its Novell acquisition. With Red Hat dominating the enterprise Linux server market, Canonical owning the Linux desktop market, and Google's Android running roughshod over everyone in the mobile market, what, exactly, is left for SUSE?

In The Clouds

Cloud, perhaps? After all, Alan Clark, director of Industry Initiatives, Emerging Standards and Open Source at SUSE, and a friend of mine, was elected in 2012 to chair the OpenStack Foundation board. OpenStack seems to have real momentum, but ever since Red Hat got involved, it's hard to see OpenStack turning out much different from Linux, where Red Hat wins in part because it's such an active contributor. Already Red Hat has gone from a somewhat light contributor to the third-highest contributor after Rackspace (OpenStack's founder) and HP.

SUSE? It barely makes the list of top-10 contributors.

In open source, being the source of the code is more important than owning the source code, and Red Hat is on pace to be the dominant contributor to OpenStack. This can't be comforting to SUSE. 

Even if we look at the Linux distributions that individuals run on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Rackspace and other public clouds, SUSE shows up as a rounding error, with Canonical's Ubuntu commanding the market and Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone CentOS coming in second. It's telling that when HP, a longtime SUSE supporter, had to choose an operating system to power its own public cloud, it chose Ubuntu. 

All of which leaves SUSE in a precarious position. 

On Life Support?

No, SUSE is not dead yet.  As longtime Linux pundit Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols told me, 

@mjasay From the outside looking in, SUSE still has some presence on servers, and it still seems strong on mainframes.

— sjvn (@sjvn) January 25, 2013

This is true, but in a conversation with a former SUSE employee who is familiar with SUSE's past and current performance, revenue from SUSE's hardware partners like HP and IBM has been constant but stagnant over the past few years. As he puts it, these longtime SUSE partners want a hedge against Red Hat, but they know that their businesses largely depend upon Red Hat. So they give SUSE just enough business to keep it alive.

This doesn't tell the whole story, though. Other sources inside the company tell me that last year SUSE exceeded its sales targets. Last year, as Forrester notes, SUSE brought in $200 million in revenue and expects to ratchet that up to $234 million.  Life is easier for SUSE now that it has jettisoned the need to upsell Novell's (pretty tired) management products. 

Post-Novell, all SUSE needs to worry about is Linux, and SUSE Linux has always had a reputation for serious quality. Now that it has seriously focused itself on the enterprise server market, eschewing erstwhile "sexy" markets like mobile, it's a much more coherent story to tell would-be customers. It remains relatively strong in Europe, as Paulo Frazao highlights, and its role as a hedge against Red Hat puts it in a good position with VMware, in particular, as Ian Waring suggests.

But even as a Red Hat hedge it plays second fiddle to CentOS, of which I was reminded by Kevin Schroeder. No, not with the server vendors, who generally avoid CentOS in an attempt to placate Red Hat. But over the past few years I've seen very large enterprises shift applications, including mission-critical applications, to CentOS as a way to cut costs. And in terms of general interest in the two platforms, well, a chart says a thousand words:

Still, this doesn't help SUSE. While I believe the company is wise to focus on the enterprise market, and not distract itself by chasing mobile or even desktop markets, doing so leaves it to compete against its old nemesis, Red Hat, without any compelling reason for the market to drop its preferred RHEL distribution for the Avis of Linux.  SUSE may well "try harder," but all it seems to have earned for its troubles is a permanent position as a distant, second-place hedge against Red Hat, whose lead continues to grow in the markets about which SUSE cares most. That's a dangerous position for any company.

Lead image courtesy of hotamr.