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...