Hey, biz bods: OpenStack will be worth $3.3bn by 2018

OpenStack looks like it will inject some $3.3bn into the market by 2018, growing from $890m this year according to 451 Research's recent Open Stack Pulse 2014 report. Much of that (roughly 70 per cent) will be from public cloud providers like Rackspace and HP, but a fair amount will come from private cloud build-out. Unless …

[MyffyW]

The more I research cloud, the more convinced I am that good systems integrators are key. Which is often at odds with expectations from clients.

[Nate Amsden]

can't keep it up

One of the tech leads for HP's Helion/Openstack told a group of blogers(inc me) a good quote at HP Discover in June -

"The easiest thing about OpenStack is setting it up - organizations spend the majority of the time simply keeping it running after it is set up."

My former boss works at a company who is working with Openstack and agreed completely. It's not ready for prime time.

I think Open Stack has a bright future, that future is just a few years out still. My personal tipping point to seriously consider Open Stack will be when the likes of Red Hat and HP offer 3-5 year support contracts for it, that will tell me they have confidence. As-is both offer max of 18 months (in HP's case at least the last 6 of which are dedicated to upgrading to the next version which they emphasized was not trivial, and depending on organization size you may be in an endless cycle of upgrading - me on the other hand the bulk of my servers still run ESX 4.1 quite happily).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: can't keep it up

Please don't base your opinion of OpenStack on HP - they are not generally considered one of the integration leaders by any stretch today. Look to the guidance of the enterprises themselves that have deployed it successfully. Companies like Walt Disney, PayPal, Comcast, CERN and Best Buy.

[PeterM42]

Don't forget.......

.......however much you spend......clouds are subject to wind and pressure and can blow away.

ie: if your internet connection fails (and they do) your cloud is just expensive, empty sky.

And, if you outsource, not only will you not get any sympathy, it will cost extra. (Where else do you think that $3.3bn coming from? - YOUR pocket!!!!)

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this chap American?

Is this reporter American?

If not, he's read far too many American presentations/press releases, because he drops in words like "program" and lines like "kicking the tires" as if they're universally acceptable, when actually, they make me cringe.

I see "z" in all presentations I receive from the US and I immediately change them, as well as all the other Americanisms. It's a shame that El Reg just doesn't seem to give a sh*t anymore...in fact, most British people (especially in IT) don't seem to give a sh*t anymore and have sold out to the utterly abhorrent way that Americans spell everything.

On OpenStack, I think there's a great deal of hot air going on at the moment - like every new platform, people who are close to it, can't see the bigger picture - because for every OpenStack customer, there are 20 who aren't even thinking about Cloud Computing.

Just like virtualisation - which kicked off in the x86 world by VMWare, around 2001 (42 years ago, if you count IBM's efforts) - it will take about a decade for the dust to settle on Cloud Computing and hopefully, OpenStack will still be there, so there's absolutely no rush, because (just like with virtualisation) a great deal of customers just don't care or cannot transition to it or have too much invested right now in existing infrastructure and strategies, to warrant a migration to any form of cloud.