back to article Gartner: OpenStack in the enterprise? Ha ha ha, you must be joking

The OpenStack world has come in for criticism from a Gartner analyst because the claims made by companies backing the open-source project frequently don't line up with reality. In a forthright post published on Tuesday Gartner analyst and research director Alessandro Perilli chided the OpenStack community for a lack of clarity …

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  1. dubno

    They said it; it must be true

    Gartner said:.....sorry I stopped reading there.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: They said it; it must be true

      Well maybe you should actually read it. It seemed a reasonable assessment and pretty balanced.

      But then there is a BIG problem with the open source community, it's this elephant in the room. What! Someone DARES criticise us? LA LA LA I'm not listening.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: They said it; it must be true

        While it sounds balanced and reasonable, I'm not hearing from Gartner doing the same kind of exercise with big vendor's products. Where is the balanced and reasonable assesment of Oracle ERP, SAP, Windows or....? Not from Gartner.

        Besides, if I had a thousand pounds for each Gartner prediction that has been missed, I'd be close to millionaire. What is a sure bet, if OpenStack gains momentum, is that in a few months we'll see Gartner saying "OpenStack is the future" and putting it in the top right corner of its magic triangle.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: They said it; it must be true

          You can find our in-depth assessment of big vendors including:

          Windows Azure IaaS here http://www.gartner.com/document/2585620

          VMware vCloud 5.1 here http://www.gartner.com/document/2605920

          Citrix ICA/HDX Protocol and User Experience here http://www.gartner.com/document/2585416

          I am sad to here that your mastery of subject didn't (YET!) lead to millions. You can always short the co.s that you think are doing well because of Gartner predictions and go long the ones you think Gartner is leaving out but will go gangbusters in the future. You can even short Gartner if you want. Just don't ignore us little people (through your new shiny monocle) when you make your millions. A "thank you for reminding me markets exist" from the top of your gold pile is all I ask.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: They said it; it must be true

        Strikes me that THERE is A big PROBLEM with COMMENTARDS making GENERALISATIONS about an OPEN source COMMUNITY WHEN THEY clearly dont participate in ONE or LIKELY never HAVE.

        All open source projects I've been involved in have been very open to outside input, and the very fact that the project exists in the first place is to provide a solution to an outside world requirement. You present no evidence/information to support a generalisation. Kindly take your generalisation back under the bridge sir

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: They said it; it must be true @AC 10:50

          "You present no evidence/information to support a generalisation. Kindly take your generalisation back under the bridge sir"

          Well, the post he responded to is good evidence. "I stopped reading when I saw who said it." There you go.

          Further evidence kindly provided by CAPS LOCK and Tom Welsh. One of the standard open source community responses in the face of criticism - it's a shill article/post. We can ignore it.

          Another standard response by, kindly provided by your good self - you're trolling, go away.

          While it's certainly true that not all open source types are like that, there's more than enough of it for it to be seen as a community thing. Trying to pass it off as a generalisation is just trying to weasel out of it.

          You say projects you've been involved in have been open to outside input - name some (provide evidence,) and I can see, can't I?

          1. This post has been deleted by its author

        2. Gene Cash Silver badge

          Re: They said it; it must be true

          UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.

      3. Roland6 Silver badge

        Re: They said it; it must be true

        Looking at the OpenStack list of member's page, I wonder whether it is perhaps too well supported and hence has a problem of no one really being in the driving seat...

        Perhaps Alessandro Perilli's piece is more of a wake up call to OpenStack's Platinum members to get their act together...

    2. Zacherynuk

      Re: They said it; it must be true

      But you'll miss the part about the magic quadrant!

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: They said it; it must be true

      "that lets companies load up a free software suite"

      It is only free If your time is of no value....Setting up and configuring this crap is a nightmare compared to commercial solutions...

  2. CAPS LOCK

    Can El Reg please stop treating Gartners stuff as facts.

    In fact can we please stop hearing about what Gartner is paid to say altogether.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @ CAPS LOCK

      "In fact can we please stop hearing about what Gartner is paid to say altogether".

      Well, I wouldn't go quite that far. All facts are potentially useful, so why shouldn't we be made aware of what Gartner is paid to say? (And perhaps given some ideas about who is doing the paying, and why).

      1. CAPS LOCK

        Re: @ CAPS LOCK

        Fair comment.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Chinese whispers

    When I was in UK software marketing at DEC, 20 years or so ago, we had a big day when Gartner came to visit. Everyone gave a presentation, and demos were running almost continuously.

    Some time later, copies of a bulky doorstop-like document began circulating in our office. Taking a look at mine - which was prominently blazoned with the names "GARTNER", "DIGITAL" and "COHESION" (the name DEC gave to its software development toolset) - I rushed into my boss's boss's office to show him our big publicity coup.

    Looking up briefly from the inevitable spreadsheet - for he was a man who preferred facts and figures to arm-waving - he remarked quietly but crushingly, "Drinking our own bath water again, I see", before returning to his work.

  4. codeusirae

    What Gartner won’t tell you about OpenStack ..

    "What Gartner can’t – or won’t – tell you about OpenStack Cloud"

  5. pythondj

    What I really Lament

    I guess I'm still lamenting that you don't get that the other real difference between Amazon & OpenStack, is that OpenStack is open source. You keep missing the point - you'll never get to see Amazon's foibles; only their final tested & hardened products. Everything OpenStack does, it does in the open making it an easy target for critiques such yours much earlier in the design & development processes. Keep it up, cause it only makes for a stronger end product.

    A Lament worth re-reading: http://tmblr.co/ZXh_Hx_s5g58

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What I really Lament

      Having only recently downloaded and trawled through the virtually undocumented DBaaS project in OpenStack (i.e. trove) I was rather disappointed by the poorly thought through APIs, the naive concept of what should comprise a DBaaS and the limited support for various popular databases.

      This article is about openstack in the enterprise. Trove is a naive implementation currently supporting only Mysql on ubuntu.

      So unless an enterprise is ready to move all its databases to mysql on ubuntu (highly unlikely), OpenStack, at least in the DBaaS arena, is just not going anywhere.

  6. polarbear

    Nothing against open source but...

    I know Alessandro Perilli as the founder of "virtualization.info" and "cloudcomputing.info" and so I'm quite sure he has nothing against open source.

    Having read his blogs for several years before he went to Gartner and some of his articles after that, I think he's actually very open minded.

    So I think that what he said about OpenStack is simply his personal unbiased opinion. Anyway I don't think it makes sense to judge a statement badly just because it comes from Gartner or IDC or The Register.

    Usually I don't judge an article or a statement based on the company it comes from.

    What I can say is that I installed my first linux (slackware) on my personal laptop in 1998 and tried Rackspace Private Cloud 1.0 last year. These two experiences were very similar. In both cases, after fooling around for a while with some configuration files, I ended up with a useless system and I couldn't figure out what the problem was. Linux made great progress since 1998 and now my Ubuntu Desktop works fine. I think the same will happen with OpenStack, it will only happen faster.

    1. Uncle Ron

      Re: Nothing against open source but...

      I agree with all your points. The big enterprise vendors started taking Linux seriously in the mid-90's. Linux is now firmly entrenched in many big enterprises. Not to the exclusion, of course, of Windows, AIX, etc., but definitely there. Twelve months from now (as you say, faster than Linux) OpenStack will be on that same trajectory. Enterprises will demand portability from one XaaS vendor to another, and from private to public and back, and proprietary stacks will be semi-obsolete. IMHO, Ceilometer, Heat, etc., will get better, quicker.

      BR,

      Edgar

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