“We don’t move into a market unless we think we have a realistic chance of gaining 40% market share with sustainable differentiation,” Chambers said at the Cisco Live conference when asked if the company needs to acquire an established cloud provider like Rackspace to succeed in cloud services. “And we try not to move into markets that don’t have really good gross margins, unless they’re unusually strategic for us. That’s a market that is very, very price sensitive; that’s taking on the big giants in Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.

How VMware sees OpenStack as a standard - Network World

[I]t is time for Dell to allow an independent open source community to take the reins of the Crowbar project. Dell “will stop sponsoring engineers to be committing and supervising the [Crowbar] project,” meaning they that the company is no longer funding developers to work on Crowbar. As Crowbar lead Rob Hirschfeld points out in his post on the topic, he and other community members will continue to work on Crowbar as an independent project.

Good ol’ TPM! Also: Rackspace is also the largest publicly traded cloud and hosting provider, and unlike its rivals, its numbers are right out there. No one knows for sure what revenues and profits AWS, Microsoft, and Google are getting from their cloud and hosting businesses, and ditto for smaller players and telcos who also sell capacity by the month or by the hours. The pressure from Wall Street has Rackspace looking at its options, and maybe had the company a chance to do it all over again, it would have stayed private.

OpenStack Code Contribution Trends

This is the common OpenStack meme for coverage. Each Summit there’s more and more users - “customers” - but it will take a while before OpenStack is suddenly us an “overnight success.” Looking at it from a different perspective, OpenStack is one of the biggest, new model for open source development: they’re iterating on the concept and mechanics of open source in new and novel ways, deep in bazaar mode vs.

“software-defined washing” - IT leaders convene on London for the UK’s first software-defined conference

OpenStack Dominated By Tire Kickers, Code Testers – For Now

Lydia at Gartner summarizes the motivations of OpenStack vendors, touching on what it means for “lock-in”: Customers should expect to be no less locked into an OpenStack-based vendor/provider than they would into any other CMP or cloud IaaS provider. Reflections on the OpenStack Atlanta summit

In many ways, Neutron’s failure and planned rebirth are a metaphor for OpenStack as a whole, with the tech promising too much at the start, becoming overly dependent on vendors, and only being fixed when paying punters started to confront its weaknesses. As the OpenStack collective learn these lessons the hope is that they will run into fewer errors, and perhaps make good on their plan to provide a viable cloud operating system to telcos and other businesses.