News

Enterprise Working Group celebrates three years helping businesses with OpenStack

Three years, three books and plenty more to come.

April 26, 2017
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It’s exciting to see the Enterprise Working Group (WG) reach the three-year milestone.

The WG was kicked off by the OpenStack Board of Directors in April 2014 and launched in May 2014 at the Atlanta Summit under the name “Win The Enterprise” WG (it was later renamed to Enterprise WG in Nov 2015), with a mission to identify and remove barriers to enterprise adoption of OpenStack.

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The group has enjoyed strong participation from a broad range of community members including OpenStack software vendors, service providers, system integrators, operators and users. These include Intel, IBM, EMC, HP, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, Hitachi, SAP, Oracle, Huawei, Mirantis, Midokura, Comcast, Walmart, T-Systems, Fidelity Investments, Unitas Global, Gigaspaces, Tesora, Aptira, Computacenter, athenahealth, and more. The working group was initially organized as multiple sub-teams (e.g., Deployment, Cattle & Pets, ISV, and Business & Marketing) to address specific functional areas. It was streamlined into a single integrated team in November 2015. The team collected feedback from operators and customers, identified critical barriers (technical and business), and tactical requirements such as reducing deployment complexity, upgrade pain points, documentation gaps, building reference architectures, cloud migration challenges, perception issues, and more.

Today, we continue to collaborate with the wider community to develop tangible solutions. We publish white papers and solution briefs to help enterprises learn and understand more about the OpenStack project and what our open source cloud platform can do for their businesses. We partnered with the Application Ecosystem WG to address adoption challenges faced by enterprise application developers. We worked with the OpenStack Foundation and produced customer testimonials, success stories, blog posts and facilitated ISV (independent software vendor) engagement.

In 2015, at the Vancouver OpenStack Summit, we held our first sprint to develop the booklet “OpenStack: A Business Perspective”, that helps senior IT executives understand the benefits of choosing OpenStack for the enterprise. In 2016, the team developed a follow-on book, “OpenStack: The Path to Cloud” that addresses OpenStack implementation. The books are published as single paperback as the “OpenStack Strategy & Planning Guide”. A third book, “OpenStack Essentials: Designing, Migrating and Deploying Applications – A Guide to Cloud Applications on OpenStack” will be available at the OpenStack Summit in Boston in 2017, addressing cloud application migration challenges. The group also manages the development of workload reference architectures to help enterprise architects and sales engineers better understand how to run different types of workloads on OpenStack clouds, such as web applications, big data and e-commerce.

The team has come a long way to help enterprises recognize and mitigate challenges and barriers related to OpenStack adoption. We like to think that we have made a difference in the ease of transitioning to OpenStack for large organizations that would not have been possible without such great teamwork!

Get involved!

To learn more and how you can help, please join the WG at the OpenStack Summit in Boston at these sessions:

  1. Learn about application migration and deployment patterns at this Foundation lightning talk, Tuesday, May 9, 10:45-11:05am, Hynes Convention Center, room 206—and receive your copy of the new book “OpenStack Essentials: Designing, Migrating and Deploying Applications”. This talk will be recorded for later viewing.
  2. Chat with Enterprise WG members over lunch on Wednesday, May 10, Hynes Convention Center, Level 3, room 309, 12:30-1:50pm. Grab your lunch, a seat, and welcome!
  3. Enterprise WG working session, Thursday, May 11, Hynes Convention Center, Level 2, room 201, 3:10-3:50pm. All are welcome to participate at any time, in person or remotely, at https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/Enterprise_WG_Boston.
  4. Increasing Direct Enterprise Engagement in the EWG, Thursday, May 11, Hynes Convention Center, Level 2, room 201, 4:10-4:50pm. Join Justin Rackliffe from Fidelity Investments in this open discussion on how the Enterprise WG can help your organization meet and surpass its OpenStack objectives. What would you like to see? How can your voice be heard?

This post was written by Yih Leong Sun, Megan Rossetti, Shamail Tahir, Kathy Cacciatore.

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