Recently Mark Smith, Global Product and Solutions Manager, SUSE sat down with Enterprise Times to talk about the future of SUSE and OpenStack. A wide ranging discussion touched on the challenges of making OpenStack the fourth cloud platform behind Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Smith believes that it is on target to be a $5 billion marketplace by 2020. He also acknowledges there is a lot that needs doing to get there.
One of the big questions recently around OpenStack is “why are we seeing consolidation?” Some analysts see this as evidence OpenStack won’t survive except as a niche solution. Smith disagrees with that view but does accept there needs to be consolidation across the OpenStack distributions. He sees the market beginning to coalesce around the big Linux vendors as well as those with experience in Enterprise Open Source products. He wouldn’t be drawn on how many distributions it would leave us with but did offer some comment on the recent SUSE/HPE asset deal around OpenStack.
