Nebula CEO & former NASA CTO Chris Kemp: ‘Next year is the year of OpenStack’

Chris Kemp has a pretty impressive resume: a co-founder of OpenStack, former NASA CTO, and CEO of next-gen private cloud startup Nebula. So when he speaks, people listen up.

On stage at CloudBeat 2012 today, Kemp predicted that “next year is the year of OpenStack.” OpenStack, the open source cloud platform that was established in 2010 by NASA and Rackspace, has attracted a lot of fans since its inception and has more than 150 participating companies using it including Intel, Dell, HP, IBM, and Yahoo.

So it makes sense that OpenStack adoption will continue to increase, especially over the next few years as more companies increase their reliance on cloud solutions. This ties perfectly to what Kemp is selling with his company Nebula. Nebula has raised more than $30 million from Comcast Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and others on the promise of equipping businesses with more flexible and secure private clouds.

Kemp argues that private clouds need to deliver all the benefits of the public cloud (Amazon, Rackspace, SoftLayer, Joyent, etc.) but behind a firewall. Ideally, you get fast and reliable computing power but with more security. He also makes a fair point that companies need better hardware, especially if they are running a cloud.

“If you’re a developer using the cloud, the hardware doesn’t matter,” Kemp said. “If you’re running a cloud, it very much matters.”

Check out the full talk with Kemp below for more interesting tidbits from this impressive fellow:

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell