IBM number one in private cloud popularity
Published May 27, 2015
By the responses of thousands of companies engaged in cloud solutions, IBM’s identity as the best provider of private cloud has taken hold.
According to Forrester Research, Big Blue is the most popular provider of hosted private cloud solutions, with IBM offerings preferred twice as much as competitor versions.
The report, “Adoption Profile: Hosted Private Cloud, North America and Europe, Q3 2014,” captures the responses of 2,255 business and technology decision-makers. Forrester 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.
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.
According to the report, “Hosted private cloud adoption held steady in 2014. Hosted private cloud adoption rose from 21 percent in 2013 to 22 percent in 2014—a difference that’s not statistically significant.” While the 1 percent difference in question suggests a lull in hosted private cloud, the hosted private cloud vendor landscape continues to grow, as does its customer numbers and environment size, the report asserts.
This discrepancy is likely a result of greater market maturity, Forrester claims, with vendors that label their offering as a “cloud”—yet aren’t truly offering cloud—are thinning out.
Security, privacy, and compliance continue to be top concerns, as the report states. Data security was the number one concern (30 percent) for hosted private cloud adopters and planned adopters, followed by data thefts or breaches (26 percent).
Firms prefer IBM, HP, AT&T, and Rackspace for their primary hosted private cloud platform. Along with the usual cloud benefit of affordability, IBM Cloud solutions promise speed and flexibility “to keep pace with today’s demanding business dynamics,” according to its marketing.
The company’s cloud offerings enable and support analytics, mobile business, enterprise resource management, development, and more. IBM is finding success in this market; Big Blue’s total cloud revenue—covering public, private, and hybrid engagements—was $7.7 billion over the previous 12 months at the end of March 2015; it grew more than 60 percent in first quarter 2015. IBM’s cloud delivered as a service business, a subset of the total, includes IaaS.
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. The report found 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 calls itself a leading supporter of open cloud computing and a contributor of code for OpenStack Integrated Projects and Cloud Foundry.