Large businesses lead the pack of OpenStack users and advocates

PASADENA, USA: Larger companies are among the fastest-growing segments of OpenStack users and advocates.

In fact, a survey conducted by Metacloud, Inc., which deploys and supports private clouds for some of the world's largest companies, reported that 72 percent of respondents at the OpenStack Summit 2014 in Atlanta last week were attending this event for the first time.

Of those first-time attendees, 65 percent are employed by companies with 2,500 or more employees, signifying a shift in the sizes of businesses that are embracing OpenStack as a private cloud option.

"The fact that the majority of all respondents are from companies with more than 2,500 employees demonstrates what we've known all along - OpenStack provides the scalability and security that large businesses need when deploying cloud solutions," said Steve Curry, co-founder and president at Metacloud.

"These companies aren't just dabbling in OpenStack; the data shows that large enterprises are using it for major workloads. In fact, 48 percent of respondents are running more than 1,000 VMs, as opposed to 29 percent at OpenStack Summit Hong Kong just six months ago, further validating the growth of large-scale acceptance of OpenStack."

Survey respondents believe that IT decision makers at their own companies fully comprehend the value proposition of cloud computing (79 percent), understand the differences between private, public, and hybrid clouds (76 percent), understand why they should consider a private cloud (83 percent), and understand why they should consider OpenStack (72 percent) in particular.

However, when asked to evaluate IT decision makers in general, 67 percent of respondents believe that most IT decision makers do not really understand what the cloud is.

"Those that have embraced OpenStack really believe that they are on to something and that it is the most robust solution available, but it seems that they believe they are in on a secret that most IT decision makers don't know," said Metacloud co-founder and CEO Sean Lynch.

"Our goal is to help businesses, large and small, understand the value proposition of private cloud, OpenStack specifically, and provide them with the most user-friendly way of implementing it for their computing needs."

Contribution to the OpenStack project is on the rise as well. Forty-two percent of respondents who contribute to the OpenStack project say that they do so for more than 20 hours per month, compared to 30 percent at OpenStack Summit Hong Kong in November 2013.

Interestingly, 34 percent of project contributors have already begun contributing to Icehouse, the most recent release - representing the continued growth of OpenStack.