Speaking at the OpenStack Summit, venture capitalist Ryan Floyd of Storm Ventures detailed to the capacity crowd why he’s putting money into funding OpenStack start-ups.
Floyd noted that his firm was founded in 2000 as an early stage IT venture group. He also candidly admitted that he is very bullish on OpenStack.
Storm Ventures has been investing in OpenStack for the last 18 months. The firm currently has invested in OpenStack startups, Metacloud as well as Swiftstack.
“I believe that OpenStack will fundamentally change enterprise IT,” Floyd said. “From an investor perspective, it’s the sort of disruption that gives entrepreneurs and start-ups the chance to compete with incumbents.”
OpenStack isn’t the only open source cloud effort, though. There is also the Cloudstack effort as well as Eucalyptus. Floyd emphatically noted that he’s betting on OpenStack, though he believes that overall the only way to do cloud infrastructure is in open source.
“You have to enable the users to be able to access, extend and modify the code,” Floyd said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with cost.”
Open Source is not an altruistic undertaking for Floyd. He commented that OpenStack has grown tremendously since being created two years ago.
“All the companies here at the OpenStack Summit are not all here for altruistic reasons,” Floyd commented. “They are here because they know billions of dollars are at stake.”
Read the full story at Datamation:
How to Make Money with OpenStack
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
