Categories
IT-Infrastructure

Analyst Report: CIO’s OpenStack Dilemma – BUY or DIY?

OpenStack has quickly become an important factor in the cloud infrastructure business. Started in 2010 as a small open source project, the solution is used by over a hundred companies and organizations around the world. Among others big enterprises (PayPal, Wells Fargo, Deutsche Telekom) as well as innovative cloud startups and developer. In the early years OpenStack was used by its initiators to build own proprietary cloud environments. More than 850 companies support the project, including IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, Canonical, HP and Ericsson.

Although OpenStack is an open source solution, this does not imply, that the setup, operations and maintenance is easy to handle. OpenStack can act like a real beast. A number of CIOs, who operate own developed OpenStack infrastructures, are reporting of a significant rise of costs and complexity. To customize OpenStack for their individual requirements they made several delicate adjustments. As a result, they have developed OpenStack implementations which are no longer compatible with the current releases. This leads to the question if a “build” or “buy” strategy is the right approach to deploy OpenStack in the corporate IT environment.

My Crisp Research colleague Dr. Carlo Velten and I had a critical look on this topic and answer the key questions for CIOs and IT decision makers in our Analyst Report „Der CIO im OpenStack Dilemma: BUY oder DIY?“.

The Analyst Report „Der CIO im OpenStack Dilemma: BUY oder DIY?“ can be downloaded under http://www.crisp-research.com/report-der-cio-im-openstack-dilemma-buy-oder-diy/.

By Rene Buest

Rene Buest is Gartner Analyst covering Infrastructure Services & Digital Operations. Prior to that he was Director of Technology Research at Arago, Senior Analyst and Cloud Practice Lead at Crisp Research, Principal Analyst at New Age Disruption and member of the worldwide Gigaom Research Analyst Network. Rene is considered as top cloud computing analyst in Germany and one of the worldwide top analysts in this area. In addition, he is one of the world’s top cloud computing influencers and belongs to the top 100 cloud computing experts on Twitter and Google+. Since the mid-90s he is focused on the strategic use of information technology in businesses and the IT impact on our society as well as disruptive technologies.

Rene Buest is the author of numerous professional technology articles. He regularly writes for well-known IT publications like Computerwoche, CIO Magazin, LANline as well as Silicon.de and is cited in German and international media – including New York Times, Forbes Magazin, Handelsblatt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Wirtschaftswoche, Computerwoche, CIO, Manager Magazin and Harvard Business Manager. Furthermore Rene Buest is speaker and participant of experts rounds. He is founder of CloudUser.de and writes about cloud computing, IT infrastructure, technologies, management and strategies. He holds a diploma in computer engineering from the Hochschule Bremen (Dipl.-Informatiker (FH)) as well as a M.Sc. in IT-Management and Information Systems from the FHDW Paderborn.