Randy Bias gave an on-camera interview to Steve Levine of TheCloudist TV at Cloud Expo in Santa Clara last week. Known for calling it like he sees it, Randy covers a lot of ground in just a few minutes:

  • “Cloud management” is a term that confuses the market. Smart cloud architects must figure what vendors using this term really mean: virtual server management, application management, infrastructure management, governance management, or some other function in a particular layer of the stack?

  • PaaS has huge potential, but it’s struggling because people think they understand SaaS and IaaS better and hence focus their efforts there first.

  • OpenStack’s rapid rise underscores how big the demand is for an open cloud environment that scales. The desire, however, is ahead of the technology, and there’s more smoke than fire in OpenStack at the moment. That’s changing fast, as companies like CloudScaling, Piston, and Nebula put OpenStack clouds into production.

  • Cloud.com’s CloudStack is not truly OpenStack. Speculating that Citrix’s purchase of the company was largely defensive, Randy suggests that the bidding war to win Cloud.com might have led Citrix to look for ways to monetize its investment. Wrapping CloudStack in the OpenStack banner would be one way to get there.

Watch the video, and tell us what you think.