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Open Source Cloud Brings Innovation in Businesses

A new report from Rackspace (News - Alert) Research finds that open source cloud technology boosts innovation in businesses. The survey was conducted by Vanson Bourne on IT managers from 250 UK enterprise and public sector organizations that currently outsource IT services. It also found that the benefits associated with open source technology are encouraging greater adoption.

Almost three quarters (74 percent) of those organizations using open source cloud technology said it makes their business more innovative. Some of the benefits of cloud technology include cost efficiency, vendor neutrality and scalability, with each driving innovation by 65 percent, 52 percent and 37 percent respectively.

Among the main benefits stated by different companies include lower total cost of ownership, no vendor lock-in, ability to move applications between different clouds and being able to run internal and external clouds on the same, open standards. Open source platforms encourage collaboration in businesses in addition to enabling businesses to avoid vendor lock. By choosing an open cloud solution, businesses avoid being locked-in to one technology and gain the freedom to move their data and applications between, public, private and hybrid cloud models as required.

Use of open source cloud is increasing, with over half (56 percent) of businesses especially those in the retail and financial sector stating the use of these technologies is increasing. While retail sector saw an increase of open source cloud business technologies by 70 percent, the financial services sector saw an increase of 69 percent.

Over 50 percent of organizations are working with two or more cloud providers, which proves that organizations are able to adopt multiple clouds. Despite this, almost a third (28 percent) of these respondents either cannot or don't know if they can host their information and applications on multiple clouds.

“Open source platforms, such as OpenStack have a long history of powering collaboration and development on technology platforms including PC’s and mobile devices,” said Rackspace CTO John Engates, in a statement. “Extending this open source community to the cloud is vital to driving innovation around cloud services and applications.”

“By choosing the open cloud, businesses are not locked into a single vendor’s pace of innovation. Instead they can work with a rich, vendor neutral community of nearly 7,000 developers and experts in 87 countries to create a new generation of cloud powered services that will help them grow their businesses,” Engates added.

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