A
lot of hype and hope has surrounded OpenStack since its 2010 debut,
with some industry watchers predicting that the open-source cloud
platform might just surpass Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware within a
few years. While the verdict is still out on that rosy forecast, a new
study from analyst firm 451 Research shows growing enterprise interest
in OpenStack deployment despite the platform’s shortcomings.
As
reported by Talkin’ Cloud, OpenStack deployments are moving beyond the test and
development phase and into a variety of enterprise workloads. According to 451
Research’s recently released OpenStack Pulse 2016 report, revenue from
OpenStack business models should top $5 billion by 2020.
Private
Cloud Driving Growth
Today,
most OpenStack revenue comes from service providers offering multitenant
infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). That will change by 2019, however, when
OpenStack private cloud revenue exceeds public cloud revenue, 451 Research
forecasts.
Even
with the projected growth, however, OpenStack revenues will be significantly
smaller than those of VMware in private clouds and AWS in public clouds.
Work
in Progress
While
OpenStack has established itself as the leading open-source choice for building
private and public cloud environments, the platform is still challenging for
mainstream IT organizations to implement, the report finds.
“This
year OpenStack has become a top priority and credible cloud option, but it
still has its shortcomings,” says Al Sadowski, 451 Research’s vice president of
research, in a statement. “We continue to believe the market is still in the
early stages of enterprise use and revenue generation.”
That
said, the OpenStack outlook is positive, with an increase in revenues from all
sectors and geographic regions, particularly from companies in the OpenStack
products and distributions category that target enterprises.
Growing
Enterprise Importance
Although
OpenStack deployment is occurring in mission-critical operations across most
verticals, it’s still essentially a platform for pilot projects, web hosting
and testing and development environments. Top use cases focus on big data,
DevOps, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and ways to better serve developers and
lines of business, the report finds. That said, a growing number of use cases
among service providers and enterprises focus on new areas, including
software-defined networking, network function virtualization, mobile and the
Internet of Things.
Another
key takeaway from the 451 Research report is that OpenStack isn’t limited to
giant enterprises. In fact, some 65 percent of report respondents work in
organizations with 1,000 to 10,000 employees, Talkin’ Cloud notes.
Additionally,
while container software such as Docker is “mostly beneficial and
complementary” to OpenStack, container management and orchestration can be a
competitive threat. “The attention to containers and their management also
threatens to eclipse OpenStack, similar to how it surpassed the rival
CloudStack in mind share and then market share,” the report notes.
OpenStack
users are adopting containers at a faster rate than other enterprises —
specifically, 55 percent of OpenStack users also use containers, compared with
17 percent of users across all enterprises, according to the study.
Bottom
line: OpenStack is gaining popularity among organizations that want to deploy
applications in private clouds and eliminate use of proprietary software. But
it still seems less appealing for legacy applications and for enterprises that
are comfortable with top hyperscale cloud providers.
