During his time as chief technical officer for infrastructure at Cisco, Ken Owens was the point man for explaining software-defined infrastructure to a new and sometimes skeptical crowd.  Eventually, the other folks at Cisco caught on to what Owens was saying to them, and now the company has a more sophisticated strategy for software-defined infrastructure.

But now, he’s taken on a similar role on the other side of the fence, as Vice President for Digital Native Architecture at financial services provider Mastercard.  Now his job is to articulate the requirements for software-defined infrastructure to a new, and perhaps even more skeptical, audience.  At the recent Open Source Summit in Los Angeles, he took note of what he considered to be an attendance imbalance between the introductory sessions and the “lessons learned” discussions, with the latter grabbing the lion’s share of people.

It wasn’t because folks already know the technology and don’t need an introduction to it, Owens believes.  As he told Scott Fulton for this edition of The New Stack Makers, he has observed a continued hesitancy among enterprises to going all-in on any technology, especially in the open source field — at least not until there’s more history behind it.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/geCyWdVa1j4