IT execs betting on private cloud in 2010

Today we announced the findings of our third annual delegate research survey which took place at Hamburg’s International Super Computing (ISC’10) event in June. Our enthusiasm about this stems from the fact that the demand for private cloud among IT executive remains undiminished from last year, in spite of the difficult year businesses have faced, with 28% of delegates planning a deployment this year.

It’s interesting to see that the main drivers have changed dramatically, however, reflecting improved awareness and understanding of the benefits of private clouds, in my opinion. For example, improving efficiency was the main motivator in 2009 (41%), but the 2010 survey reveals that drivers for deploying private cloud have evened out in 2010: efficiency (27%), cost cutting (25%), experimenting with cloud (19%), resource scalability (17%) and IT responsiveness (6%). I believe that this suggests that there has been an improvement in the level of understanding of the benefits which private clouds can deliver.

Furthermore, the increased significance placed on cost cutting (25% compared to 17% in 2009) also suggests that the cautious economic climate has influenced drivers for adoption. 62% of executives also think that clouds are an extension of clusters and grids, with only 17% thinking it is a new technology. This indicates that greater awareness of private clouds is resulting in recognition that private clouds are the natural next step for organizations already using clusters or grids.

It’s also telling that while the appetite for private cloud in 2010 remains as strong as in 2009 and general understanding is better, IT executives seem unconvinced about the benefits of using an external service provider for ‘cloud bursting’ – where the public cloud is tapped into when a company’s own resources reach capacity – with over three quarters (79%) stating that they have no plans to do this in 2010.

Predictions are always difficult, but I expect that private clouds will continue to outpace public cloud models and that the correlation between private clouds and hybrid use-cases such as ‘cloud bursting’ will increase over time. Only ongoing measurement and time will tell. Meanwhile, we’re extremely positive about the long-term future of cloud computing.