Open infrastructure growth

Open source software, once just the domain of technology hobbyists, is taking over the software world. Open source is included in mission critical software portfolios of virtually all ‘Global 2000’ enterprises, the world’s largest public companies. Because of the fast paced innovation in the form of collaboration and knowledge sharing and with more and more companies delivering support contracts and services, open source solutions provide a competitive edge.

Due to its fast paced innovation OpenStack open infrastructures have become the biggest private cloud solution that companies use as their production cloud environment. What other reasons you will probably apply open infrastructure technology.

Quality

As open source projects gain adherents, more people and companies contribute to continuously improve stability and quality. Furthermore companies offer support and managed services, making sure that you don’t have to worry about managing the infrastructure. 

A related factor is the ease of deployment, another sign of the rapid maturation of open infrastructure cloud projects. In fact, wether you need a converged cloud infrastructure or a hyperconverged cloud infrastructure, an open infra cloud deployment is done in half the time compared to a proprietary cloud solution.

Scalability

The traditional proprietary private cloud is often focused on the needs of a particular market segment, for example large enterprise, SMB, SME. Marketing and upselling aim to leverage the capital the software vendor has invested in its product portfolio. Open infra clouds typically are built and composed around the requirements of the customer and grow linear instead of exponential.

It allows companies to build a small but enterprise ready open infrastructure next to their proprietary cloud and slowly move payload from proprietary recources onto the open infrastructure.

Security

Security was once viewed as an open source liability, but that has changed. According to market research, one of the reasons selecting open infrastructure is because of security reasons. Open infrastructures allow companies to review and improve code for potential security flaws. Companies like that transparency nowadays. But more so, when a piece of software is interacting with data, companies like the fact that with open source you can see what’s going on in that data stream. Which makes them able to continu improving the enterprises protection against future critical security liabilities.

Faster innovation

Proprietary software vendors create and develop their products in house. Open source vendors however, aren’t starting from zero; they innovate on top of a common base. For example using OpenStack, companies are continuously automating more to improve the companies efficiency. In the last couple of years we have seen many innovation added to the OpenStack cloud platform such as DNS automation, billing automation, data protection automation, et cetera. This way the IT staff can use their time to even innovate and automate more improving the competitive edge of the company every day.

Feature set

According to marketing research, 80 percent of companies plan to increase their use of open source software over the next five years. The number of companies using open source for mission critical workloads grew from 60 percent to 73 percent in just two years. And sure, price was a factor. Even when adding in support costs, Open infrastructure solutions are generally significantly cheaper overall. But, according to the report, price is not the most important factor. The first factor is the feature set and the power to innovate, making sure enterprises keep up with fierce competition and fast development of market solutions.

Costs

Of course, open infra clouds are not always free. The cloud software itself is mostly free but running your production cloud infrastructure without the support of an Open infrastructure partner may feel a bit risky. Just as with proprietary cloud infrastructure you want to have the safetynet of a partner to help you when questions or problems occur. Or maybe you don’t want to manage your cloud infrastructure at all. Today many companies choose a public cloud solution like Amazon Web Services or Azure mostly because they don’t want to manage their own infrastructure anymore; without knowing that they can have the same, and even more, features using an open infra private cloud within their own datacenter fully managed by an external company for half the costs.

Collaboration

In the past, when several companies needed the same functionality, they built it from scratch using a product from an outside vendor or formed a consortium to create and maintain the product. Open source software streamlines this process by enabling competing companies to work together. This frees up time and money for companies to spend working on projects that differentiate themselves. By participating in development, enterprises can help influence the way software evolves and build relationships with other developers.

Cutting edge technology

In many areas, open infra clouds are no longer trailing behind proprietary clouds. With integrations like Big Data analytics, Edge Computing, Internet of Things and the use of containers together with physical and virtual machines (VMware, HyperV or KVM) all features provide many high profile solutions driving the evolutions of these platforms, without the upsell of options necessary using proprietary cloud.

Customization

Open infrastructure platforms allow companies to use the cloud ‘as is’ or to modify it. Some OpenStack users, modify the cloud to create a platform with specialized customer or company features, or even create a unique business model on top of it. In fact, the adaptability and flexibility of Open infrastructure is one of the most important features for companies selecting Open infrastructure instead of proprietary cloud.

Reliability

And last, but most certainly not least; the reliability and the level of support on open infra clouds is amazing. Open source service providers like Thymos Engineering jump in, roll up their sleeves , participate and take ownership. Open source companies share great ideas and make things happen. But, don’t take my word for it. Our customers speak for us. Because we’re not just about providing a product, Thymos Engineerng is about customer services. OpenStack is complicated. We get that, but we are not going to let you struggle because of it. The emails that make my day come from customers who rave about our support staff. We are not behemoths like Amazon or Google; the plus side of that is that we are more agile and more willing to work with and for you. Customers successes are our successes, every step of the way.

Conclusion

So whatever reason your company has to innovate fast; open infrastructures are important catalysts to evolve your business in fast changing markets. Of course many more reasons exist why companies prefer Open infrastructures, and if yours is not listed here, I'd love to hear from you.