Red Hat CTO asserts OpenStack buzz is more than just hype

Summary: Red Hat's CTO presents the open source giant's case for becoming the leading brand of OpenStack for the enterprise market.

Open source has been at the forefront of tech chatter for a long time, but arguably buzz around the movement has reached a fever pitch this year in the enterprise IT world.

OpenStack, a global collaborative effort to deliver open source cloud computing software, is certainly at the heart of all this, pushed prominently by Red Hat.

Speaking at Gigaom Structure 2014 in San Francisco on Thursday, Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens cited that the open source software firm has upwards of 100,000 customers.

He followed up that he hasn't met a customer yet who doesn't want to discuss OpenStack -- if not being the first item on the agenda.

When asked on-stage about how much of that is noise or solid deployment by real customers, Stevens leaned more toward the latter but acknowledged that the ebullient interest might be "unusual."

"It's early technology. The code hasn't been around forever," Stevens remarked. "OpenStack is much more than just the original two projects of Swift and Nova."

Observing the most interest spread across North America, Europe and Asia, Stevens explained that OpenStack has emerged as a better model for building a multi-tenant, sharable infrastructure.

For businesses wanting to tap into both the public cloud but also on-premise schemes, Stevens declared the answer is OpenStack.

"They know what's where they want to get to. The question is how to help them," Stevens said.

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Red Hat CTO asserts OpenStack buzz is more than just hype