SUSE and Others Find That Public Clouds Aren't Getting Smacked By Private Ones
A wave of new survey results is coming in, and the numbers make a clear case that the open cloud is going to remain one of the biggest tech stories of 2016. Not all of the results are totally rosy, though. There is brand new evidence that a lack of workers with OpenStack skills may be holding the cloud platform back, especially at enterprises. SUSE LLC’s survey on OpenStack adoption trends reports that over eighty percent of enterprises are either planning to, or have already, implemented OpenStack as a cloud computing solution within their organizations. That means the need and desire is there. However, more than half of all organizations that have tried to deploy OpenStack say they’ve failed to do so due to a lack of skills.
Meanwhile, more survey results show that OpenStack is gaining traction in Europe, and there are signs that public cloud infrastructure isn't going anywhere, even as private clouds are on the rise.
A very notable 96 percent of respondents to the SUSE survey believe there are business advantages to implementing an open source private cloud. The most common reasons for adopting private clouds were to reduce costs and/or because of budget constraints (67 percent), and to increase agility/innovation (77 percent) – advantages associated with open source solutions.
However, last month, IDC found that revenue from public cloud infrastructure sales rose almost 26 percent to $4.6 billion in the third quarter of last year, outgrowing private cloud infrastructure sales, which grew 18.8 percent.
According to a recent Synergy Research Group study, 2015 was a year where the growth rate for public Infrastructure and Platform as a Service (IaaS/PaaS) services hit 51 percent, outgrowing the private and hybrid cloud segment, which grew at 45 percent.
The SUSE survey also reports that as enterprises increasingly look to OpenStack for their private cloud investments, they are wary of challenges and complications, including:
- High degree of difficulty: Half of all enterprises that tried to implement an OpenStack cloud have failed, and 65 percent of companies report they have found the implementation experience difficult. In addition, nearly half (44 percent) plan to download and install OpenStack software themselves, potentially adding to the degree of difficulty.
- Vendor lock-in constraints: 92 percent of respondents have concerns about vendor lock-in when it comes to choosing a private cloud infrastructure solution.
- Skills shortage: 86 percent of respondents said the lack of skills in the market is making their companies reluctant to pursue private cloud. In addition, 78 percent of companies that have yet to adopt private cloud are deterred by the skills shortage.
A very high 89 percent of UK respondents claim that lack of cloud skillsets in workers is making them reluctant to choose private cloud options.
Al Sadowski, research director, Service Providers, for 451 Research, said, "Due to the complex nature of the projects, managed services and OpenStack distributions are increasingly the deployment choice for those users that remain supportive of the platform after struggling to find success with the do-it-yourself approach. We continue to see OpenStack becoming the de facto open source option for deploying private clouds."