IT as a Service in a Market with your Stack

Could private OpenStack clouds revolutionise IT procurement?

The promise of private clouds with OpenStack is clear; vendor neutrality and cost savings through scale and commodity hardware. Unfortunately these goals seem elusive to businesses when matched with the choice between the operating complexity of raw OpenStack or expensive turn key, single vendor hardware clusters.

OpenStack could deliver "turn key" and cheap very simply if only the marketplaces existed using OpenStack programming interfaces and a crowd of open source suppliers.

Marketplaces

As the cloud provides the abstraction layer, there leaves three simple classes of product that could be sold through a market:

1. Hardware (pre-installed commodity distributions)
2. Private SaaS (anything that can run in a datacentre)
3. Support Services

The only thing missing seems to be a self service marketplace where these products can be realised by businesses directly.

If anyone is interested in such a market let me know? I feel a software project coming on...