Table 2 Evidences of coopetition among OpenStack’s contributors by revenue model
Revenue model | Exemplar competitive dyad | Brief description |
|---|---|---|
Complementary services | HP vs. Mirantis | Both firms compete for Open-Stack related IT projects. Both provide consultancy, integration, customization, testing, deployment, among other IT services. The “body shopping” businesses model is often employed (i.e., the practice of providing technology workers for a contracted short-term project). Price is often determined on a project basis involving long vendor/client negotiations. |
Complementary software | VMware vs. Cisco | Neutron, the OpenStack cloud networking controller includes a list of plugins that enable interoperability with various commercial and open source network technologies, including routers, switches, virtual switches and software-defined networking (SDN) controllers. Both VMware and Cisco provided such complementary commercial software plugins. By offering this complementary commercial software, VMware also leveraged its visualization technologies while Cisco also leveraged its physical network solutions. |
Complementary hardware | IBM vs. Intel | OpenStack real-life deployments often require costly hardware capabilities. OpenStack is most often deployed in multiple-processor computer systems at specialized data center facilities. By September 2014, IBM was marketing its new POWER8 CPU architecture as OpenStack-friendly. Meanwhile, Intel marketed its Atom C-2750 and Xeon E5-265x-class processors as optimized of OpenStack deployments. |
Distribution & support | Red Hat vs. Canonical | Both Red Hat and Canonical designed business models around the commercial support of Linux distributions: e.g., Red Hat Enterprise Linux vs. Ubuntu Advantage. The same applies to OpenStack distributions: By September 2014, Red Hat commercially distributes and supports the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform vs. Canonical’s distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack. Even if OpenStack is freely distributed in an open source way, many enterprise customers opt by a commercially supported distribution with legal contracted service level agreements. |
Public clouds hosting | HP vs. Rackspace | Similarly to Amazon, HP and Rackspace also provide public cloud services. Unlike Amazon, the offering of HP and Rackspace relies on OpenStack technologies. Any third part actor can contract OpenStack based cloud services both from HP (HP Helion Public Cloud) or Rackspace (Rackspace Public Cloud). The price of cloud computing services are often determined as a function of renting time multiplied by needed capacity (number of CPU nodes, storage and network requirements). |