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What Industry Analysts are Saying about OpenStack

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Did you know that “Let’s got outta here!” is the most common scripted line in all Hollywood productions? Whether it’s Ariel, Han Solo, or a group of star-studded kids shouting in unison, it was used at least once 84% of the time, from the late 30s to the mid-70s!?!?

If you are like me, you enjoy quoting movies, politicians or famous people. It’s not for the lack of originality but perhaps it’s the humor or levity it can bring… or simply the realization of a situation.

So the question is: what’s the situation with OpenStack today? (And who can I quote?)

We know OpenStack is growing in popularity – in fact, we’re hearing from more and more Fortune 500 companies every day, interested in learning about how and why to incorporate backup and recovery into their OpenStack-based on-prem clouds. But we thought it would be interesting to see what others think about OpenStack, and where it is headed. Here are some very interesting quotes for you:

IDC’s Thoughts on OpenStack and the Cloud

“Cloud IT infrastructure growth continues to outpace the growth of the overall IT infrastructure market, driven by the transition of workloads onto cloud-based platforms.” – Kuba Stolaarski, research manager at IDC, as published in “Five years of OpenStack: A bright planet takes shape,” on OpenStack Superuser, July 17, 2015.

From OpenStack in the Enterprise: A Potential Foundation for Your Cloud Strategy,” IDC Technology Spotlight

  • “Suffice it to say that we are now at a juncture in the industry where IT executives are not questioning ‘whether’ to embark on their cloud journeys, but rather ‘how’ to make cloud work.”
  • “As organizations such as PayPal Intel and CERN make public statements about running large production environments based on OpenStack, IT executives are asking a number of very pertinent questions around whether they can do something similar to provide the foundation for their own cloud strategies.”
  • “OpenStack plays a key role in increasing efficiency by creating a widely interoperable, function-rich platform to orchestrate datacenter resources and eliminate traditional IT siloes.”
  • “Managing these various delivery models [public and private cloud] will require a major focus on hybrid cloud, and as a result, IDC expects that hybrid cloud will become the dominant cloud deployment model in the future.”
  • “This is a fast evolving space, and the next phase of the OpenStack journey is not far away – enterprises looking to develop a longer term cloud strategy would be best advised to keep abreast of these dynamic developments.”

Forrester Research: “OpenStack is Now Ready for Business

  • “In the age of the customer, OpenStack offers CIOs a credible platform upon which they can drive the transformations required for their business to become innovative, agile, and truly responsive to evolving customer needs.”
  • “At Wal-Mart, for example, OpenStack is the foundation for a global eCommerce platform that has reduced costs while also improving scalability and agility as the company introduces new products.”
  • “Companies use OpenStack to run customer-facing apps that support millions of simultaneous users. If it didn’t work, no Fortune 100 would risk its customer reputation on it.”
  • “Early stories of OpenStack were limited to high-tech, research group, or non-enterprise stories like those from CERN, Digital Film Tree, and the NSA. More recently, Fortune 100s – like Wal-Mart – have not only shared their adoption stories but also published assessments of OpenStack’s tangible benefits and total economic impact.”

451 Research: “The OpenStack Pulse 2015

“Key enterprise drivers cited in selecting OpenStack include modularity, avoiding vendor lock-in and large IT vendor investment.”

Of course, like with any technology, there are detractors to OpenStack. But overall, many research firms are seeing increased adoption of OpenStack – and not just in DevOps projects. OpenStack is being used in production and customer-facing applications in business-critical situations.

So go ahead…if you need to get your point across to colleagues that OpenStack adoption is here to stay, quote someone!