The vast majority of Europe-headquartered public cloud providers are expecting their business to expand this year. 85% of the organizations surveyed for IDC’s European Cloud Provider’s Technology Investment Survey indicated that they expected their business to expand. The majority (70%) expected growth through demand from their local markets, with 30% looking at new geographic opportunities.
With growing demand for their services cloud providers are looking at their technology requirements. IDC’s research shows that:
• There is a distinct difference in approach to technology between the smaller European cloud providers and the large global providers. European cloud providers are running infrastructures that are much closer to those of traditional enterprises than the global providers.
• Open source has much higher use in European cloud providers than traditional enterprises, with 56% of servers running Linux, 81% of organizations standardizing on Apache, or a mix of Apache and Microsoft’s IIS, and 69% standardizing on MySQL.
• Reliability is highly prized in systems supporting public clouds, followed by price, supplier service capability, and energy efficiency.
• Only one in five cloud providers is evaluating the scalable infrastructure propositions offered by systems vendors, but a large majority that have evaluated them (88%) plan to standardize on them.
• Converged infrastructure propositions (systems that combine storage, networking, and compute) are less attractive than scalable propositions, with 54% of companies surveyed saying that converged infrastructure is not attractive to them.
IDC’s European Cloud Providers’ Technology Investment: An IDC Survey (IDC #GE62S, June 2010) summarizes the main findings of a survey of Europe-headquartered cloud providers. The document includes an analysis of subjects such as growth plans for these suppliers, pricing models, approaches to managing the datacenter, uptake of virtualization, and attitudes to new systems designs. For more information, please contact your local IDC office or visit www.idc.com.