At the opening of OpenStack Day in Melbourne, hosted by Aptira, Jonathan Bryce said we are at an important tipping point with cloud technologies. And while his comments were informed by the results of the foundation’s recent user survey, I think he’s right.
Bryce said the rise of OpenStack reflects a shift. When the platform was new, its adoption was driven by technical users. But the recent rapid growth is reflection of increased user adoption. That is, the uptake of cloud solutions has moved from technical drivers towards business drivers.
“If you look at what’s happening overall, when you have new technologies on the scene, especially open source technologies, there’s a ramp up phase where you see a community form and you see the software adoption happen after that initial ramp-up phase,” said Bryce.
The other change the OpenStack Foundation is seeing is cloud technologies, particularly private and on-prem solutions are growing. He noted that in the most recent user survey it wasn’t just large companies, academics and researchers that were adopting cloud technologies. They were finding their way into smaller organisations.
For OpenStack, this is a significant opportunity. Many SaaS, IaaS and PaaS offerings are underpinned by open source technology and Bryce sees OpenStack being a major player in that business.
According to research Bryce presented from Forrester, cloud deployments are spread quite evenly between public cloud (32%), hosted private (35%) and internal private (33%). Driven by cost, compliance and capability, Bryce said businesses might start with a public cloud solution to solve a problem before moving to a private solution using either a third party or on-prem systems.
He calls this a multi-cloud.
According to Gartner’s recent Cloud Services forecast, we can expect the cloud business to grow to be worth about $400B by the end of the decade, from around $250B today.
Ratika Garg, the Founder of KAIROS Strategic Consulting, recently discussed this, saying the cloud could either be consumed or leveraged, or businesses could deliver their own cloud.
Bryce, during his keynote, said we are now at a major inflection point as businesses move from the initial benefits of virtualisation, where cost reductions were key drivers, to a new world where we are looking for ways to better integrate systems and services. He noted that systems are now focussing on successful processes and culture, rather than who has the best technology and skills.
If you’ve missed the Melbourne event, OpenStack is holding the OpenStack Summit in Sydney from 6-8 November. It will be preceded by a three-day hackathon.
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