The interview
Q: What is your name?
Dr. Alberto P. Martí, VP of Open Source Innovation at OpenNebula Systems.
Q: What is your product?
OpenNebula Systems, born in 2010 and headquartered in Madrid (Spain), is the private company that develops OpenNebula, the open source cloud and edge computing platform.
Q: Is it SaaS? PaaS? IaaS? Other?
OpenNebula works as a Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM) and IaaS platform, combining support for virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters with federation, multi-tenancy, and the automatic provisioning of multi-cloud and edge infrastructure resources for building private, public, and hybrid clouds.
Q: Do you provide your technology to cloud operators?
Yes, OpenNebula can be used by cloud operators to offer their virtual infrastructure resources to third-parties, or to set up virtual private clouds for their customers (often under a managed cloud model). Cloud providers currently using our technology include The Bunker, WEDOS, eApps, ProcoliX, BIT, and Namecheap.
Q: Are you a market leader? Who do you consider the leader in your market? Does GAFAM play any role in your market?
First released in 2008, OpenNebula enjoys a unique position in the market as the only European open source cloud orchestration and management technology. Globally, the enterprise cloud market is currently dominated by VMware—an American proprietary software vendor—and by OpenStack—an open source cloud technology managed by the (Texas-based) OpenInfra Foundation and mainly developed and commercialized by non-EU companies like Red Hat (now part of IBM). The main role that GAFAM plays in this market is as a provider of additional cloud services to customers through a Hybrid Cloud model.
Q: What are the unique selling propositions of your product? Is your solution different or better than competing solutions?
In the context of the EU-funded project ONEedge (2019-2022), OpenNebula has incorporated new edge features to enable users of the platform to easily build their own private, lightweight edge computing environments based on highly-dispersed edge nodes in close proximity to users, IoT devices, and other sources of data. OpenNebula now supports an Edge Cloud Architecture able to build distributed cloud environments to run any workload—both virtualized and container workflows—on any resource—physical or virtual—anywhere—on premises and on the cloud. OpenNebula’s traditional cloud management capabilities have been extended with all the innovative features needed to automatically provision on-demand additional infrastructure resources offered by Telecom/5G operators, hyperscalers, and public edge providers, thus offering a unique abstraction layer on top of private or public cloud infrastructure. This multi-provider, application-agnostic model opens the door to true workload portability and automation while helping companies prevent vendor lock-in.
Q: Which free and open source software solutions do you use?
OpenNebula uses, integrates, or supports many other open source technologies, either directly or through community add-ons and drivers, including KVM, LXC, Firecracker, Terraform, Ansible, MySQL/MariaDB, Kubernetes, Docker, Zabbix, Prometheus, Grafana, Ceph, LINBIT, Ubuntu, and AlmaLinux.
Q: What components did you develop yourself?
OpenNebula is mainly developed by OpenNebula Systems, which is also in charge of defining its roadmap and supporting its community, while providing SLA-based support, enterprise tools, consulting, and managed cloud services to its customers.
Q: What are the strong points of your technology?
OpenNebula offers a powerful open source alternative to VMware users, reducing on the other hand the overhead and costs associated with OpenStack. OpenNebula is uniquely positioned to offer a sovereign alternative to EU companies and public agencies looking at ways to minimize their dependency on non-EU tech vendors and cloud providers. At the same time, thanks to the innovative features developed with support from the European Commission, OpenNebula provides a single tool to deploy and manage highly-distributed infrastructure at the edge and to easily connect it to existing data center or cloud environments, enabling the development of new business models and go-to-market strategies based on the emerging edge computing paradigm.
Q: Can you name users or clients of your solution? Preferably in the CAC40, DAX30, Fortune500, European governments?
For a public list of users and customers, please visit our Featured Users, Case Studies, and Success Stories webpages, where you will find more details about how OpenNebula is being used by companies such as Telefónica, Booking, AlmaLinux, Akamai, Runtastic, Dustin, Qt, Ooma, Perspecta, EveryMatrix, CEWE, UCLouvain, Harvard University, and Iguane Solutions. OpenNebula is present in the European public sector in organizations like, for example, the French Ministry of Education, the Flemish Department of Environment & Spatial Development, Deutsche Post, the Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE), the Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA), the Netherlands Police, Junta de Andalucía, Red.es, and the Austrian Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG).
Q: Why did this client choose your solution rather the solution of the market leader or GAFAM?
Customers usually refer to OpenNebula’s simplicity of use, adaptability, openness, and flexibility as the main reasons why they adopted it as the open source technology of choice to run their enterprise clouds.
Q: What European policies do you suggest to ensure sustainable development of your technology and its adoption?
As Commissioner Thierry Breton has pointed out, “in the digital decade, Open Source will be a key element to achieve Europe’s resilience and digital sovereignty”. We agree that open source helps to reduce the market entry barriers and improve cost, increasing market competition and technology neutrality. We also believe that open source minimizes vendor lock-in and gives Europe a chance to create and maintain its own, independent digital approach and to stay in control of its processes, information, and technology, fostering an open ecosystem around sustainable joint innovation. However, Europe can accomplish its digital independence only as long as its industry assumes an active role in developing the open source technologies that a next-generation edge cloud requires. We would very much welcome any European policy aimed at strengthening the active involvement of European companies and governments in the European open source ecosystem. That is why in 2021, along with other EU open source technology providers, we launched the SovereignEdgeEU initiative.
Q: To what extent are the interoperability projects financed by France and Europe likely to guarantee the development of European cloud technologies?
Although regulation on interoperability between cloud providers is always welcome (and would definitely make integrations easier for us to develop and maintain in the long term), given the clamorous lack of success for more than a decade now in consolidating the use of any specific standards for cloud computing in the global market, we are forced to keep operating under the assumption that support to popular ‘de facto’ standards for cloud services (e.g. AWS’s S3) or for cloud operation (e.g. HashiCorp’s Terraform) will still be key drivers for the enterprise cloud market in the future, in Europe and beyond.
Q: Can you give us an idea of sales/staff/clients/end users over the last 3 years?
In the last 3 years we have consolidated a user base of more than 5,000 active enterprise clouds, with around 2,000 evaluations per month of our open source technology by new users.
Q: Tell us about a successful implementation. How did you implement it, why was it a success, where is this implementation today? Plans for the future? How is the relation with the client? Did the client help you get other clients?
OpenNebula’s sustainability model follows an organic growth strategy, in which OpenNebula Systems obtains from paying customers and business partners the resources needed to keep developing and improving the product, and adapting it to the evolving needs of its community of users. We expect OpenNebula, as a unique European open source technology, to play a key role in the current efforts to build Europe’s next-generation edge cloud, and to create the technology that Europe needs to bring some balance to the cloud market. Apart from chairing the Cloud/Edge Working Group of the European Alliance for Industrial Data, Edge and Cloud and coordinating ambitious Horizon Europe research projects like COGNIT, OpenNebula Systems is also one of the few Spanish companies involved as Direct Participants in the “Important Project of Common European Interest for Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure & Services” (IPCEI-CIS).