PaaS-related tweet volume was down significantly (-17.9%) since September and Google text search and news results dropped as well (-6.2% and 8.1%, respectively). Higher stock prices for publicly-traded PaaS companies buoyed IPA led by impressive gains by public cloud stalwart Amazon.com (+13.0%) on stronger than expected Q3 revenue despite a net loss of $41 million.
IPA's performance was lackluster but a few stories still made PaaS headlines. One in particular generated nearly 3,000 news articles, rants, and Tweets: OpenStack, the popular open source private cloud operating system, is pushing into PaaS with its Havana release.
The Twitterverse lit up with speculation that Havana might make other PaaS options sitting atop OpenStack and OpenStack alternatives like Pivotal's integration with Cloud Foundry obsolete. I disagree.
Havana is substantial but enterprise cloud strategies are so immature that just forcing the discussion in IT is more important than anything predatory that might result from Havana. As a VP of IT told me this week, "...we're a year away from cloud vendor selection. We got 2014 budget approved to propose how we'll migrate Exchange out of our datacenter and that's just because we missed our uptime SLA the past three months. Beyond that, we're chasing rainbows."
