Mirantis only offers OpenStack, in comparison to rivals HP and Red Shift, which combine it with their own products. But how is this defining its business?
1. Cloud Foundry is a better prospect than OpenShift
OpenShift, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering from Red Hat, hasn’t been adopted enough to gain real traction, according to Renski, who chose to integrate his company with PaaS firm Cloud Foundry.
"Cloud Foundry has a much bigger market share and much broader adoption than OpenShift in the market," he said. "So instead of spending effort integrating [the latter] we integrated Cloud Foundry."
2. Competition is about scale and process, not differentiation
Bigger rivals can gain more penetration into a market, which presents a problem for firms like Mirantis.
Renski said: "You compete not on technology differentiation – you compete on scale and process. We have 750 people but Red Hat has 6,000 and HP 100,000."
3. Too much demand for skills, not enough supply
Because OpenStack is a new technology, there have not been enough people studying it.
"There is an enormous demand for OpenStack skills and there are not enough skills out there in the market," Renski said.
4. Adoption of OpenStack is reducing vendor politics
The open source alternative to other PaaS offerings means that companies are having to play by the same rules and integrate competing products.
"Customer adoption created a counter balance to vendor politics, so the more customer adoption there is the less vendor politics there is," Renski said.
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