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!

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.

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. :-)