IBM is the most popular provider of hosted private cloud according to a survey from independent research firm Forrester Research.
According to the analyst firm, IBM hosted private cloud solutions are preferred twice as much as competitive offerings.
Forrester Research found that more than twice as many firms use or plan to use IBM as their primary hosted private cloud platform, and nearly twice as many firms use or plan to use IBM when implementing multiple vendor cloud solutions, compared to the next closest competitor in the survey.
The report, “Adoption Profile: Hosted Private Cloud, North America and Europe, Q3 2014,”1 was based on a survey of 2,255 business and technology decision-makers.
Forrester defines hosted private cloud as a category of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) where the solution lives off-premises in a hosted environment and compute resources are dedicated and isolated for customers.
“A common business technology (BT) agenda request that we receive from our infrastructure and operations (I&O) clients is baseline adoption data for hosted private cloud to inform their cloud strategies and compare their progress with that of their peers,” says Laura E. Nelson, research analyst, Forrester Research.
“In 2014, adoption seemed to level off for hosted private cloud, but factors such as "cloudwashing" and increased market awareness of what a true hosted private cloud is paint a more accurate picture of adoption than in past years.”
Nelson says this report showcases the following North American and European hosted private cloud data: 1) adoption relative to other deployment types; 2) adoption by country; 3) adoption relative to previous years; 4) top concerns; 5) top drivers; and 6) the most popular vendors for hosted private cloud.
The survey also reported that the top drivers in choosing to adopt hosted private cloud include improved IT infrastructure and flexibility, lower total cost of ownership for servers, on-demand capacity and scalability, and improved disaster recovery and business continuity.
One concern for choosing to adopt hosted private cloud according to the report was vendor lock-in with the report finding that “standards like OASIS’s TOSCA and open source projects like OpenStack provide enterprises the future hope of less lock-in and greater adherence to standards.”
“IBM is a leading supporter of open cloud computing and a key contributor of code for OpenStack Integrated Projects and Cloud Foundry,” says a spokesperson for IBM.
At present, IBM total cloud revenue - covering public, private and hybrid engagements - was US$7.7 billion over the previous 12 months at the end of March 2015; it grew more than 60 percent in first quarter 2015.
