An overwhelming majority of enterprise IT decision makers surveyed say that OpenStack is part of their organization’s future cloud infrastructure plans, according to results of the 2013 Path to an OpenStack-Powered Cloud survey announced today by Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions.

The OpenStack and private cloud development survey of 200 U.S. enterprise decision makers, commissioned by Red Hat through IDG Connect, found that the majority of organizations (51 percent) are on either their second or third implementation of private cloud, using internally developed solutions or alternative offerings from vendors. The survey results show that internal development of private cloud has left organizations with a host of challenges to address, including:

• Resource management (21 percent);
• Simplifying IT management (18 percent);
• Application management (18 percent); and
• Application migration (18 percent).

As organizations work to address these issues, survey results indicate that enterprises are moving, or have plans to move, to OpenStack for private cloud initiatives. Sixty (60) percent of survey respondents indicate that they are in the early stages of their OpenStack deployments, and have either not yet completed the implementation stage or are early in the process. An overwhelming 84 percent of respondents say that OpenStack is part of their future cloud plans.

Survey respondents cite management visibility (73 percent); deployment speed (72 percent); platform flexibility (69 percent); better agility (69 percent); and competitive advantage (67 percent) as the unique benefits offered by OpenStack over private cloud alternatives. The top challenges to OpenStack adoption include IT staff skill gaps (32 percent), budget limitations (23 percent), and questions about OpenStack project maturity (11 percent) and where to start (10 percent). Survey data further indicates that decision makers believe OpenStack vendors and system integrators are best-positioned to provide experience, help justify investments, and close employee skill gaps.

“The survey findings offer a clear indication that OpenStack is quickly becoming a reality for many IT organizations, and can serve as a viable cloud infrastructure backbone for private cloud,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, Virtualization, Red Hat. “The survey shows that business leaders understand that OpenStack can bring improved visibility, speed, flexibility, and agility to the private cloud. As these organizations move to OpenStack-powered clouds, they are looking to IT industry leaders to deliver enterprise-class OpenStack by offering a normalized lifecycle, training and support, and a broad ecosystem of partners and OpenStack-certified solutions that will make their journey seamless.”

See an infographic highlighting the results of the 2013 Path to an OpenStack-Powered Cloud survey at http://bit.ly/PrivateCloudSurvey.