In June of 2014, Red Hat acquired OpenStack pioneer eNovance to help bolster its global OpenStack portfolio. TechRadar Pro sat down with Raphaël Ferreira, CEO and co-founder of eNovance, to discuss what that means for both companies and the OpenStack community at large.
TechRadar Pro: eNovance has recently become part of the Red Hat family. While many of our readers who follow the cloud and OpenStack space are familiar with you, others may not have a full grasp of eNovance's history and contributions to the OpenStack movement. Can you give us a quick overview and background on the company?
Raphaël Ferreira: eNovance helps enterprises, ISPs, and telecommunications providers deploy cloud infrastructures quickly and cost-effectively, along with managing a large variety of web applications on public clouds.
Over the past four years, we've become known as a customer-driven company and our commitment to the OpenStack platform has enabled us to customise cloud architectures specifically adapted to meet our customer's needs – whether private or public.
TRP: Why did you choose OpenStack as your core cloud building technology?
RF: We started to build the company around open source technology, and the more we got involved with the project, the more evident it became to us that it was a great solution for most IT challenges. It was at this point that we became fully committed as a company in driving the adoption of OpenStack as a cloud computing platform. With OpenStack we are able to provide continuous deployment, integration and management support.
TRP: What are some of the milestones reached by eNovance?
RF: We have helped cloud service providers to launch profitable cloud offerings. Our customer base has grown to more than 150 companies globally, all of whom are powering their businesses with cutting-edge cloud deployments.
In the fall of 2013, we began our partnership with Red Hat delivering OpenStack integration services to joint customers, and in June of 2014, we were acquired by Red Hat driving stronger "carrier-grade" features into OpenStack.
TRP: How does eNovance and Red Hat fit together? What are some of the synergies that made this a good fit on both sides?
RF: As enterprise interest in OpenStack continues to grow, so does the need for specialised cloud services. eNovance has traditionally been known as a leader in OpenStack services for the enterprise, and will immediately add a very deep expertise in OpenStack technologies to a growing core of OpenStack capabilities within Red Hat. Our success in Europe also represents a rapid and immediate global expansion of Red Hat's OpenStack services capabilities.
TRP: With the growth of OpenStack products on the market, how does eNovance's offering stand out?
RF: One of eNovance's key differentiators has always been the way we deliver OpenStack. Our viewpoint is that Openstack is not a finished product, and should be delivered in real-time based on individual use cases. For those customers wishing to port their workloads onto OpenStack, it is important that they work with a vendor that allows their workloads to scale both when and wherever they're needed.
With eNovance now under the Red Hat umbrella, we will be able to offer our customers not only a world-class OpenStack product offering, but also the integrated core advisory and implementation services that allows them to take full advantage of OpenStack the way it was originally meant to be delivered and optimised.
TRP: Could you give us some background on OpenStack and the platform's momentum?
RF: Considering that OpenStack has just celebrated its fourth anniversary, it is amazing to see the progress that this technology has made, and the maturity of the solution as it stands today. In their latest market research report from August 2014, analysts at 451 Research project that revenue for OpenStack business models will exceed $1.7 billion (around £1.05 billion, AU$1.9 billion) by 2016.
There's also been an explosion of vendors, and it's a "high-tide raises all boats" scenario. The sheer mass of contributors will help the technology continue to grow and expand in ways that no one person or company could ever envision. And the quality of both the contributors, and their contributions, has likewise been remarkable. In May there were more than 4,500 OpenStack developers in Atlanta for the OpenStack Summit, and the Paris event in November is expected to be even larger.
It took Linux nearly a decade to achieve this level of mainstream adoption. The development cycle for OpenStack is incredibly fast – consider that the ninth software release, Icehouse, came out in April to great reviews. And already the design summit for the next release, Juno (OpenStack releases are named alphabetically, like hurricanes), was held in Atlanta in May, with a release scheduled for October!
TRP: How has eNovance and the OpenStack landscape in Europe changed over the past few years?
RF: eNovance has been at the forefront of the OpenStack movement – acting as one of the top ten contributors to the initiative – and is a European Gold Member company of the OpenStack Foundation. Choosing the OpenStack platform was initially a way for us to distinguish ourselves from traditional hosting companies, and the rapid growth and adoption of the technology has proven that was the correct decision.
Choosing OpenStack has enabled a smaller company like us to provide tier-one managed services on open source clouds that rival the largest providers, all the while providing customised solutions and the best customer service possible.
With regards to OpenStack in Europe, the market was lagging until just recently when the gap between adoption of OpenStack and cloud services in general has begun to close on a yearly, monthly and even daily basis in some cases. The main reason for this is the shift in the way customers are consuming and CIOs are delivering IT to their organisations.
We've seen a large number of European companies including big telcos and major service providers reshape their application strategies and embrace the development philosophy favoured by the OpenStack community, moving away from the more traditional waterfall approach to a more agile methodology.
With shadow IT and data privacy becoming a much bigger problem, and as more and more customers redesign their mission critical applications to better leverage resources in the cloud, we expect demand for on-premise, off-premise and hybrid clouds to continue to grow at a rapid pace across all of Europe over the next six to twelve months.
TRP: Put on your prognosticator's hat for a minute. What do you see as the future of OpenStack?
RF: Implementations and installations in both the US and EU have continued to expand. Krishnan Subramaniam (director, OpenShift strategy, Red Hat) has compared OpenStack today to Amazon in 2008. OpenStack is now enterprise-ready with stable, reliable versions, and that, combined with the support and certified solutions available from the OpenStack ecosystem, will lead to further adoption of OpenStack in the enterprise.
Red Hat has been at the forefront of OpenStack, both in the community and in the enterprise. We just announced Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5 with expanded lifecycle support, and our OpenStack ecosystem – the industry's largest, focused on commercial deployments – continues to grow. Dozens of proof-of-concept deployments are underway for Red Hat's OpenStack offerings, with customers around the world now moving to enterprise deployments. It's an exciting time as OpenStack moves into the enterprise.
Today, we are seeing the "hybrid-first" cloud strategy as a necessary step in enterprise adoption and its ultimate success. Our enterprise customers need to be able to leverage their investments in their private cloud and complement it with the flexibility and variable cost structure of public clouds.
Another area we see growth is within the public sector, financial or other highly regulated arenas where security is paramount. Efficiency will drive them to the cloud, but privacy and compliance needs will push the public sector and financial industries to OpenStack to keep their most confidential data secure.
About Raphaël Ferreira
Raphaël founded eNovance in 2008. He is a member of the OpenCloudware project, and was named 2013 Entrepreneur of the Year by EY.com and L'Express, for building and leading a successful and dynamic business.
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