Organizations need great skill sets to accept open source compared to traditional proprietary solutions as there's a big difference between building a solution from scratch with all integrated support and utilizing tried-and-tested vendor solutions. For many enterprises, these challenges are too daunting, and erode the value of the open source choice for them. Business strategies, investments, and many other factors come into play. In these situations, enterprises find that a commercially-supported distribution of open source solutions, or a proprietary solution, better supports their strategy. Customers build digital and online selling channels as a pillar of their go to market strategy, develop their own proprietary implementation of OpenStack aligned to the unique demands of their business use cases.
Customers have invested in the time, talent, and resources to refine OpenStack to meet their specific needs. A major sports retailer had chosen open source based solution rather then to implement a commercial distribution of OpenStack .VMware Integrated OpenStack help customers to save their time and resources, investing their technical talent in refining the outbound customer-facing portions of their strategy. Open source is undeniably a strategic part of every company's software portfolio today. While open source software has its strong suits, being production-ready is not one of its top attributes. There's still a lot of work to do: getting that code to meet the standards of a commercial, sold product is not an insignificant investment, and requires specialized skills.
From selection to testing, integration, and security, some assembly is required. For most enterprises, that's not an investment they want to make; they are better served investing in their core competence, not in becoming an expert in a single implementation of an open source project. That's where commercial providers, such as VMware, step in to provide the pragmatic, practical open-source-based software that enterprises can rely on.
Open vSwitch (OVS) is another example of VMware's contributions. The code was transferred to the Linux Foundation collaborative projects for ongoing community support with VMware, and continues to play an active role as VMware engineers are responsible for as much as 70% of the active commits to OVS. These contributions are considered personal, and community support across the industry continues to grow. VMware is making strategic investments in the IoT space with EdgeX and network functions virtualization (NFV) with expertise in the open network automation platform (ONAP).
Clarity is an excellent example of creating software internally and choosing to open source it to benefit a broader community. Clarity is a UX/UI design framework as it helps both developers and designers with the visual aspects of applications. Clarity was developed internally in VMware to meet the UI/UX needs of products but it's not contingent upon VMware products to work or to deliver value. It can be applied and used in nearly any environment, so the choice was made to open source it. Clarity has taken off as it has an active community, has been downloaded more than 100,000 times, and has nearly 1,000,000 views on its homepage. Our open source projects also include tools and kits that help a developer to be more efficient.
Challenge handshake authentication protocol (CHAP) is a tool that analyzes un-instrumented ELF core files for leaks, memory growth, and corruption.
VMware products are based in open source, which we support and contribute to but we are not an open source software company. VMware software, whether propriety or based on open source, is production-ready: it is fully supported, fully tested, and optimized—it's secure and ready to deploy.