Cloud Computing Survey Finds Scalability and Cost Savings Driving Cloud Adoption

Cupertino, Calif. - June 14, 2011 – Cloud.com, a provider of open source cloud computing software, along with its partners Zenoss and BitNami, today announced the results of a comprehensive cloud computing survey conducted to determine the key IT objectives and inhibitors for cloud adoption. The survey was conducted by polling members of the communities that surround each company's popular open source projects (BitNami, CloudStack and Zenoss Core). A summary of the report is available for download here. Survey respondents included more than 500 IT professionals, 40 percent of whom were CTOs, architects and IT managers from a wide-range of organizations including government, education and enterprises.

“There is an unprecedented amount of interest around cloud computing but as with any nascent technology, industry users and solution providers are still coming to grips with the benefits and deployment options for cloud computing,” said Mark Hinkle, vice president of community, Cloud.com. "The survey findings help identify the needs of organizations and their preferences for deploying virtual infrastructure so we can develop solutions that best suit the needs of cloud computing users.”

The survey findings reveal a pervasive use of open source and a strong preference for deploying virtualized infrastructure on dedicated data center resources. Additional highlights include:

Overwhelming interest in cloud computing:

• 61 percent of organizations are in the information gathering or planning stages or have an approved cloud computing strategy (but no implementation), 20 percent have cloud implementations and 20 percent have no cloud computing plans at this point;
• Hardware savings was the number one reason cited for adopting cloud computing (68 percent), faster deployment of infrastructure (66 percent) and to reduce systems management burden (57 percent) were also top reasons for cloud adoption; and,
• Of the surveyed Chief Technical Officers, scalability (71 percent) was the most popular reason for adopting cloud computing followed by elasticity or the need to adjust to fluctuations in resource demands (61 percent).

Open source prevalent in the cloud:

• Open source usage is pervasive among cloud computing users with 69 percent using open source software whenever possible while only 3 percent claim not to use open source software at all. All government users indicated some degree of open source usage;
• The open source Linux operating system is the dominant guest operating system in the cloud with 83 percent of IT professionals planning to deploy Linux as a guest operating system, 66 percent will be deploying Windows OSes in the cloud; and,
• Of those users who don’t use open source software 58 percent have no cloud computing strategy.

IT professionals unwilling to cede total control to the cloud:

• 70 percent of data center managers choose to deploy infrastructure on dedicated resources (e.g. dedicated servers and data center resources) while only 12 percent prefer to deploy their infrastructure in the public cloud;
• 57 percent of participants preferred to host their infrastructure on their own hardware; and,
• 36 percent of respondents indicated that their preference was to run their infrastructure virtually but hosted on dedicated hardware at a managed data center.

“What was telling from a service assurance perspective is that half of the respondents who have deployed cloud computing felt their tools were not well-suited to manage cloud infrastructure," added Bill Karpovich, CEO, Zenoss, Inc. “This reinforces our experience and belief that effectively managing the cloud requires tools built for the cloud."

BitRock CEO, Erica Brescia noted, “Our goal is to simplify the deployment and maintenance of applications in the cloud. The survey results make it clear that web applications are a leading use case for cloud computing. Our BitNami Cloud Hosting service provides one-click deployment and simplified management of popular web-based business applications to facilitate the process of running these applications in the cloud for both new adopters and existing cloud users."

About Cloud.com

Open source software provider Cloud.com simplifies and accelerates the deployment, management and configuration of multi-tier and multi-tenant private and public cloud services. Cloud.com’s CloudStack software is being used to provide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) in production environments at leading enterprises and service providers, providing them with exceptional stability, and is unrivaled in both feature breadth and scalability. Founded in 2008 by leaders in open source, virtualization and infrastructure development, Cloud.com is backed by leading Silicon Valley venture capital firms. For more information, go to www.cloud.com.

About BitRock

BitNami Cloud Hosting is developed by BitRock, the leader in cross platform deployment. Its customer base includes businesses, governments, and educational institutions throughout the world, from Fortune 100 companies to independent game developers. The leading open source companies trust BitRock for the packaging and deployment of their offerings, including Alfresco, SugarCRM, MindTouch, Jaspersoft, Pentaho, MySQL, GitHub, Zmanda and dozens of others. BitRock-built stacks have been downloaded millions of times and over a hundred thousand users visit BitNami.org every month, making it a reference site for open source web applications. BitNami is an official Amazon Web Services solution provider. To learn more, visit: bitnami.org/cloud.

About Zenoss Inc.

Zenoss is a leading provider of management software for physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT infrastructures. Over 25,000 organizations worldwide have deployed Zenoss to manage their networks, servers, virtual devices, storage, and cloud infrastructure, gaining complete visibility and predictability into their IT operations. Customers include Rackspace, VMware, Hosting.com, LinkedIn, Carlson, Motorola and Deutsche Bank. Zenoss was recognized as a “Visionary” in Gartner's 2010 Magic Quadrant for IT Event Correlation and Analysis. To learn more about Zenoss' award-winning solution, visit https://www.zenoss.com.

Media Inquiries for Cloud.com:

Heather Fitzsimmons
Mindshare PR
+1 (650) 947-7400
heather@mindsharepr.com