BMW And OpenStack Drive Each Other
In inexorable march of software technology is disrupting entire industries as the flexibility of software-defined systems ranging from storage to networking redirects the very economy that helped create the disruption. Hence, argues the executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, "We are living in a software-defined economy."
"Everyone competes with a startup," Jonathan Bryce told the OpenStack Summit in Paris this week, a gathering that included 4,600 user and developer representatives from 59 countries. "This is a new competitive environment where everyone is facing disruption from smaller, more agile competitors."
As an example, he cited the inroads made in the global automotive market by upstart Tesla, which is fielding snazzy new electric cars that are a new kind of "mobile" device. Tesla has even attempted to disrupt the traditional dealership model used by the former "Big Three" American car makers and their European Asian rivals.
One automaker, BMW, has taken notice and embraced OpenStack as a way to achieve efficiencies in the cutthroat auto market.
The new software-defined reality means operators are mixing and matching new technologies inside datacenters. And for software development, that means releasing new software "early and often," Bryce said. As the pace of software development speeds up, "deploy to production" has replaced the traditional software release cycle.
"No one is passively taking what they are offered anymore," he told the summit. "The central planning committee is dead."
Part of the choice now available to datacenter operators involves virtualization, something Bryce said was implemented in an orderly fashion by IT departments. Whereas, cloud computing, which he defined as an "insurgent technology," is being driven by vendors and users alike. The result is that anyone with a credit card can procure whatever technology they want.
Meanwhile, software development is increasingly occurring in "pockets" throughout enterprises. In that sense, "Every company becomes a software company," the OpenStack chief argued.
Those who succeed under this model are creating frameworks or platforms that allow user to create the environment they desire. Bryce likened this process to Lego, now the world's largest toy company: "Legos are a framework for creating the environment you want, very simple building blocks that you can turn into whatever you want."
This building block approach is one reason why cloud adoption has skyrocketed, Bryce insisted, changing the way software is developed and moved to production where it can generate value.
Along with cloud technology, the growing open source movement has spurred innovation in software development. Just as software has redefined the global economy, open source is redefining the "every layer of the technical stack" that drives the economy, noted Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation executive director.
Zemlin estimated that as much as 80 percent of enterprise software used today is open source. That, he argued, allows companies to shed R&D costs while focusing on innovating in the remaining 20 percent of the stack in order to differentiate their business.
Among the industries begin disrupted by the software-defined economy and the open source community is the automotive sector.
Stefan Lenz, IT infrastructure manager for BMW's datacenter operations, described the transformation of the automaker's datacenters from an internal, private cloud using "conventional" virtualization and automation to an infrastructure based on OpenStack cloud management tools. The shift to the cloud was driven by the need to be more cost efficient, but the German carmaker's private cloud eventually reach a point of diminishing returns.
BMW sees two major advantages in OpenStack, Lenz said: "First, we have an API and a data model to describe cloud and virtual instances that will become industry standard." That means software development based on those standards will be stable, and "we do not have to change whole tool chains," Lenz explained.
"That's the point where we failed because we were unable with our internal cloud, with our own development, to get that stable" environment.
Seeking economic efficiencies, BMW also embraced OpenStack since it was open source and free of licensing fees. Lenz added. "No one earns money on the growth of our company."
For manufacturers like BMW, the stakes are high, as is the requirement for a stable IT platform. "Every sixty seconds that your IT does not run, one car is not built," Lenz stressed.
