Red Hat kicks Piston out of Red Hat Summit, then performs $13,000 U-turn In the past two hours, Red Hat has booted cloud upstart Piston out of the upcoming Red Hat Summit, changed its mind minutes after The Register started asking questions – and has now waived Piston's $13,000 summit sponsorship bill. Documents seen by The Register indicate this kicked off after Red Hat lost out on a valuable …
@Trevor_Pott, would love to hear more about your reaction to this. There's been a ton of hype around "easy" openstack installs. Every few weeks, I meet someone that claims that another company has solved the openstack deployment and management issue. A friend of mine that follows openstack very closely for a big company says this: "As for Piston, who cares. They are irrelevant and don't matter. Too small with not enough customers. The real battle is HP, IBM, and Red Hat"
A month ago, I was in a meeting with a large openstack cloud provider and he told me that Red Hat had won the battle. Would like to see the Piston Cloud deployment numbers in a few months.
BTW, I like your insights into all this. Keep um coming.
"A friend of mine that follows openstack very closely for a big company says"
As for $_vendor, who cares? They are irrelevant and don't matter. Too small with not enough customers. The real battle is $_established_vendor_upon_whom_I've_trained_my_whole_career_array[1], $_established_vendor_upon_whom_I've_trained_my_whole_career_array[2], and $_established_vendor_upon_whom_I've_trained_my_whole_career_array[3]
------------------------
As for Google, who cares? They are irrelevant and don't matter. Too small with not enough customers. The real battle is Lycos, Dogpile, and Yahoo
------------------------
As for Lenovo, who cares? They are irrelevant and don't matter. Too small with not enough customers. The real battle is HP, Dell, and IBM
------------------------
As for Tintri, who cares? They are irrelevant and don't matter. Too small with not enough customers. The real battle is EMC, Netapp, and HP
------------------------
As for Piston, who cares. They are irrelevant and don't matter. Too small with not enough customers. The real battle is HP, IBM, and Red Hat
------------------------
In my view PistonCloud have the greatest understanding of Openstack of all companies currently playing the game. As a consequence of such, they make the best Openstack implementation. They contribute an incredible amount of code. As a consequence of such they have a lot of say in the direction of Openstack.
Metacloud is another one to watch. Their implementation may not be the greatest, but their model is to deploy it for you and manage it for you. Openstack On Your Premises as a Service. Once they've won an account they don't lose it. They have gained an absolutely cult following.
RedHat is taking a very JBoss approach to Openstack, just like HP, IBM and everyone else dipping their toes in. To wit; they are focused on packaging up other people's work in an enterprise friendly fashion in the hopes of leveraging their existing sales channels to drive new revenues using a new product with the minimum amount of effort.
PistonCloud, by contrast, are focused on building the best damned product they can with the belief that if they are the best they will win. This is arrogance on their part and it shows immediately if you actually spend any time with PistonCloud employees. They honestly believe they are the best.
They're probably right.
Our industry is littered with examples of products that were mediocre at best winning out because of who backed them. Our industry is also chalk full of examples of companies that rose to unrivaled dominance because they were categorically better than anyone else.
When I analyze the former situation I see that mediocre products win out over better ones in situations where the companies in question can use market dominance in one area to create market dominance in another area.
When I look at Openstack I see a brand new market. One where open technologies are the driver because the new world of "cloud" means a race to the bottom on margins. Here is where the best technology with the easiest implementation wins.
That means that PistonCloud, despite their size, is a real, viable, honest to $deity threat...and I don't think we'll have to wait long to see that drama play out. What matters is the next 18 months. That is how long the major players have to buy or kill PistonCloud. I am curious as to what will happen.
... and for humility admitting they made a mistake.
Also, as someone with interest in KVM I would hate if customers were given a reason to perceive OpenStack as a toy rather than serious platform. Childish behaviour of the core maintainer would surely make it look so.
Hope Piston will put this sorry episode behind. Here is small suggestion to help fix relationship.
A bit of a correction here.
While Red Hat has put in a bit of effort on Open Stack recently, they are NOT "the core maintainer". In fact, they were quite late to the party and only hopped on board after their own efforts were going to get them left behind.
Red Hat had best play nice or they might just see themselves ostracized by a community that was getting on just fine before they tipped in.
> and only hopped on board after their own efforts were going to get them left behind
Yeah, no kidding. I saw the v1.1 release of their 'automation' suite (CloudForms) and it was PATHETIC. Totally not ready for release. Needed at least another 6-12 months of work. Still, professional services managed to con a large company into replacing their VMware vDirector v1.0 which had hit EoL. They were so proud of their first, commercial sale there was going to be a PR trumpeting this paradigm altering event. Hmm, I can't find anything in their archives about it so it must have gone as well as a lead balloon, just as I said it would. Heh.
Since CF didn't have a prayer, I expect that's why they jumped into OpenStack with both feet. I'll give RH props though - they are willing to spend the time and effort to polish a variety of opensource in the rough. And Open Stack desperately needs some sanity, spit and polish.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
