Forrester Analyst Is Among the Latest to Wonder About OpenStack

Even as the OpenStack cloud computing platform spreads out and continues to attract big backers, there are very prominent naysayers. We've covered warnings from Gartner about how enterprises need to size OpenStack up carefully. Lydia Leong is the author of a cloud computing report that Gartner put out where she said: "In reality, OpenStack is dominated by commercial interests, as it is a business strategy for the vendors involved, not the effort of a community of altruistic individual contributors." Now, Forrester analysts are out with their own criticisms.

InfoWorld notes that Forrester analyst James Staten says that member organizations need to see a return on investment from OpenStack, or they may lose interest, and also takes note of a response from Jim Curry, GM of Rackspace's private cloud business: "It's still very early, which is why vendors are contributing code to the project to ensure their products and services work in the OpenStack ecosystem."

Indeed, it is very early for anyone to lose interest in OpenStack. There are now many different distributions of the platform, and they are all going to be backed by different types of support, documentation and training options--not to mention feature sets. It seems that a major tech vendor delivers a new distribution of OpenStack each week, with Cisco being the latest one. 

OpenStack not only has numerous powerful companies backing it, but most of them are part of the OpenStack Foundation.  We'll see many kinds of flexible options grow around the platform over time.

That still doesn't appease everyone, though. As we reported, according to the results of a new survey from Zenoss, there are many concerns about open source cloud offerings in general. Specifically, respondents noted concerns about maturity, lack of support and security. Still, more than half of the enterprise-based respondents to the Zenoss survey said they are looking at deploying an open source cloud in the future.