Gartner: OpenStack Lacks Clarity

An anonymous reader writes with a quick bite from El Reg: "The OpenStack open-source project has come in for criticism from a Gartner analyst because the claims made by companies frequently don't line up with reality. In a forthright post published on Tuesday Gartner analyst and research director Alessandro Perilli chided the OpenStack community for a lack of clarity, lack of transparency, lack of vision, and lack of pragmatism." An OpenStack developer disagrees, and instead suggests that the perceived lack of clarity is just a result of the open development process. You just don't get to see which Amazon cloud projects fail since they are hidden behind the corporate wall.

Comments

Re:Company claims don't line up with reality?

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Gartner "study" disparages product competing with study's funder? Shocked! Simply Shocked!

Funded by

[Havokmon]

Gartner is nothing more than a PR company for whoever pays for their 'analysis'.

Re:Funded by

[dyingtolive]

And I was just thinking: "Wait, Gartner is calling attention to the claims made by companies not reflecting reality?! They going to out themselves next?"

Re:Funded by

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

If Gartner predicted the Sun was coming up tomorrow, I'd be wondering who paid them to say it, and what the angle was.

Re:Funded by

[Nerdfest]

I'd be checking IBM's site for a 'Sunrise' product. Of course with IBM's site, I'd have to go back and actually use Google to find it.

Re:Funded by

[s.petry]

While I agree with your point, I have to also agree with a few of the points Gartner's analyst made. Ever try to implement OpenStack? Some things are okay (Virtual Machines), but other things are horribly convoluted (Virtual Routing). Version upgrades break previous functionality, and documentation is lacking so finding what actually broken requires lots of time and effort. Waiting for the documentation to catch up is fine until you need a feature or bug fix in the latest version.

I'm not claiming that it's horrible mind you, but rather pointing out that it needs some time to mature. Gartner's opinion does not mention the fact that OpenSource products like this can do very well (Apache, Linux, MariaDB/MySQL). At the same time, enough OpenSource projects fall off the Earth to have some concerns.

Re:Funded by

[Havokmon]

While I agree with your point, I have to also agree with a few of the points Gartner's analyst made. Ever try to implement OpenStack? Some things are okay (Virtual Machines), but other things are horribly convoluted (Virtual Routing). Version upgrades break previous functionality, and documentation is lacking so finding what actually broken requires lots of time and effort. Waiting for the documentation to catch up is fine until you need a feature or bug fix in the latest version.

I'm not claiming that it's horrible mind you, but rather pointing out that it needs some time to mature. Gartner's opinion does not mention the fact that OpenSource products like this can do very well (Apache, Linux, MariaDB/MySQL). At the same time, enough OpenSource projects fall off the Earth to have some concerns.

"A lie is best placed between two truths."

Gartner always makes some valid points. They are masters of manipulation.

While it sounds like you're well-informed, the majority of their followers are not and I would go so far as to say those people, even when reading the details presented within, rarely truly understand the content.

Re:Giant mess.

[Sarten-X]

So in other words, it's exactly like a commercial package, except the support staff are on your payroll rather than someone else's, so you actually get something set for your needs rather than whatever the salesman was pushing.

Re:Not A Fan of Gartner but they have some points.

[TheRaven64]

There's a difference, which is that most crappy corporate software isn't attempting to define standards and a platform for everyone else to build on top of. OpenStack claims to be developing a vendor-agnostic standard and reference implementation for interoperable systems.

Could say the same about Gartner

[DarkOx]

Its funny, I would apply almost all those same vague criticisms to Gartner.

I wish people would just quick subscribing to the pay to play crap opinion pieces they try to pass off as research. Its painful obvious to anyone who actually has to /use/administer/support/deploy an IT product where it falls in the "magic quadrant" has more to do with the market cap of the company behind it, that the products own merits.

Re:Not A Fan of Gartner but they have some points.

[RightSaidFred99]

Really? Have you seen Azure? I don't mean "scoffed and dismissed it without knowing shit about it" like many would do.

It works very well and provides a _shitload_ of features, both PaaS and IaaS.

Re:Gartner lacks intelligence

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical techie response which lacks insight into the needs of the rest of the world...

Not that I am defending Gartner - they are a marketing company which publishes positions based on who has paid them money - but the whole "just get the source code and ..." thinking demonstrates a basic lack of understanding for the rest of the world. It is just as bad and just as myopic as Gartner is.

Re:Not A Fan of Gartner but they have some points.

[Nerdfest]

I find frequent upgrades is better than buggy, under-featured 'enterprise' software that is not updated (as in fixed) for years.

True, though the timing is "convenient"

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

This was my impression, too. OpenStack has a lot of potential, but look at the way a "competitor" like Apache's CloudStack is presented, and the documentation and UIs for configuring OpenStack do seem to be much less developed if there's much there at all. There's an interesting comparison here, though it is more than a year old now.

Still, I doubt the timing of these comments on the Gartner blog are coincidental, given the pressure the big networking hardware companies have been under and the threat to them that SDN represents.

For example, Cisco's stock price has been crashing for some time, and things like blowing a billion-dollar deal with Amazon aren't helping their prospects or, presumably, their share price. The same site (it's Business Insider, so apply your own level of confidence in anything they say) describes Cisco's response as 'a confusing array of products named "Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)"', but one thing we do know ACI is that much of it will be unavailable until next year.

I have no insider knowledge of who might have "encouraged" this particular set of comments from Gartner, but Big Networking is probably a fairly regular "customer", so I have at least one plausible theory. :-)

Re:True, though the timing is "convenient"

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I think the timing of his articles are based on his attendance at the OpenStack Summit. Since he is writing the articles after only a week, I don't think the timing is "convenient" but rather "coincidental". Now if he wrote this article 4 months from now and talks about his observation at this conference, I would have been more inclined to believe that they withheld his article until it could be used to counter some major announcement.

Re:True, though the timing is "convenient"

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm not sure what Occam's razor suggests here, as either explanation seems both simple and plausible. It's only been a couple of weeks since Cisco announced the Insieme arrangement and ACI, too. Perhaps you're right and it's just coincidence, or maybe there is some truth in both theories.

Re:True, though the timing is "convenient"

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Fair enough, calling it a crash was probably an overstatement. Still, after a series of bad news reports in recent months, from missed targets to laying off thousands of employees, along with guidance that wasn't exactly glowing in confidence on the last call, their share price has given up most of the gains in the first months of 2013.

Maybe you're right and they'll weather SDN as they've fought off other threats before, but I have a feeling this time really could be different. My simple reason is that a lot of these big networking companies are making large margins on their device sales, and a lot of the functionality in those boxes can increasingly be achieved using commodity hardware and freely available software. That creates market conditions open to disruption. Factor in effects like the NSA mess potentially hurting international sales and the general incompetence of the US government hurting domestic sales, and it's a tough market for Cisco right now.

It was interesting that in the first BI article I linked, they described an internal analysis by Cisco execs that said going into the SDN business would 'turn Cisco's "$43 billion business into a $22 billion business"'. Of course that was an anonymous source "close to the company" so we probably shouldn't read too much into it, but if the key point is true, it gives us some indication of how much of a change in the market Cisco's own people think is possible.

translation from Gartner-speak...

[swschrad]

"This can't be a good technology because they didn't pay us to write the paper. fortunately, our friends did."