Electric Cloud, the private development cloud company, and Osterman Research, the firm providing research and insight for companies, today released results of a survey of senior-level IT professionals on private and public cloud use and adoption. The survey, conducted with senior-level IT professionals, including CIOs, directors and VPs, revealed that despite widespread adoption of cloud computing, many organization are not fully leveraging the cloud infrastructure they have implemented. Of the companies using private or public cloud computing, 52 percent have cloud infrastructure resources that are rarely or never used and 47 percent report some or lots of excess capacity. 

Cloud computing adoption growing

• Forty-eight percent of organizations report using or are planning to use private cloud computing
• One in five organizations (20 percent) are currently using public cloud computing, and another 34 percent are investigating with the intent to implement a public cloud
• Fifty-five percent of companies using public cloud computing, and 39 percent of those using private cloud computing, first adopted cloud computing in 2010 

More than half of companies underutilizing cloud computing

• More than half of companies (52 percent) report having cloud infrastructure resources that are rarely or never used
• Forty-seven percent report some or lots of excess capacity

Private cloud computing used, considered for use for software development and test

• Software development is one of the biggest uses of private cloud computing
• Fifty-six percent of companies report using or considering to use private cloud computing for software development and/or testing

Cloud computing spend to grow in 2011

• Among organizations that have implemented cloud computing, spending on cloud-based infrastructure averaged $6,335, or $23.31 per employee, in 2010
• That spend is expected to rise to $6,920, or $26.63 per employee, in 2011
• Average return on investment (ROI) for cloud infrastructure was reported at 46 percent (however 57 percent of respondents either did not know or could not quantify their ROI on cloud computing)

“Cloud computing is real and happening, and in the enterprise, private cloud is happening first,” said Electric Cloud CEO Mike Maciag. “But many of those resources are sitting unused. Software development and testing are a perfect fit for private cloud computing, but developers haven’t been able to fully leverage the resources available to them because a gap has existed between their cloud infrastructure and the software they need to do their jobs. ElectricCommander 3.8 bridges that gap, connecting the resources IT provides with the tools developers use to enable a private development cloud.”

Software development and the private cloud

Software development tasks perceived to derive the greatest benefits from private cloud computing were:

• System testing, 49 percent
• Requirements planning and tracking, 42 percent
• Static analysis, 39 percent
• Source code control, 34 percent
• Defect tracking or deployment automation, 33 percent

Among companies that use a private cloud, 86 percent of respondents said having more visibility into the development team’s resource utilization would be somewhat to extremely desirable. When asked about the barriers to development using the private cloud more, respondents reported the following: 

• They feel the need to manage their own processes and environment, 50 percent
• Their entire development tool chain is too difficult to get on the cloud, 12 percent
• Their brittle infrastructure precludes moving it to the private cloud, 21 percent
• We have not yet made it available to them, 18 percent

“Cloud computing is increasingly an essential component of many organizations’ computing resources, and it will become more important in the future,” said Michael Osterman, founder of Osterman Research.  “However, a variety of barriers need to be overcome for use of the cloud in software development environments if the cloud is to reach its full potential and provide a better, faster and less expensive environment in which to develop and test software.”

A total of 100 senior-level software development professionals including CIOs, directors and vice presidents were surveyed. Respondents had worked in an IT function for an average of 9.1 years. The median number of employees at the organizations surveyed was 403. Respondents were selected using a combination of the Osterman Research survey panel and an external provider’s survey panel. Most organizations surveyed were located in North America.

Complete survey findings can be found at http://www.ostermanresearch.com/results/or_ec0111.pdf. For more information on software development on the private cloud, visit Electric Cloud’s ElectricCommander 3.8 page at http://electriccloud.com/products/electriccommander.php.