Canonical founder: "OpenStack no lifeline for legacy tech suppliers"

Supplier lock-in fears

Shuttleworth admits his view point may be unpopular with some portions of the OpenStack community. However – with supplier lock-in an enduring concern for enterprise CIOs – opting for a legacy supplier-backed version of the platform is not something they are rushing to do.

“What do customers want? They don’t want to get locked in to someone’s database as a service they happen to have dumped on OpenStack,” he said.

“They want database as a service and they want it on every public cloud and on private cloud. They’re not going to get it just on OpenStack.”

Canonical’s open source Ubuntu operating system is widely used in the OpenStack user community to manage their cloud deployments, while the company itself is renowned for being the first out of the blocks to start commericially distributing the platform. 

Disconnect between customers and suppliers

If and when OpenStack does fail to deliver the returns the legacy supplier community dreams of, the initiative may come under fire as a result, but the supporting community will rise above it, Shuttleworth added.

“A lot of that disconnect you see between what customers want and what suppliers hope customers want is about to come crashing to the floor. On the way out, those suppliers will say ‘OpenStack has failed’, and ‘here are all the things OpenStack did wrong’,” he said.

“In 1999 and 2000, when the dotcom bubble burst, the internet didn’t stop. A bunch of dotcoms died, but the internet did not stop. In the same way, OpenStack will emerge from all of that controversy and hysteria, stronger, more focused and more confident in itself.”

So, while some portions of the supplier community may come away from OpenStack feeling short-changed, the project will succeed in giving users what they want, he added.

“I have no qualms about OpenStack’s relevance or its success, but I absolutely believe there are folks who hope to get things out of it they won’t get out of it. But the world will get everything it needs out of this project,” he said.

Computer Weekly contacted both HPE and VMware for a response to this story, but had not received a response at the time of publication.