2016 VMworld: Insights From Customer Survey
The Platform9 team was at VMworld 2016 recently, and the results from our survey on trends in enterprise cloud infrastructure are in. We gathered insights from speaking to over a thousand people, 300 of whom gave us quantitative feedback by participating in our survey.
VMworld Audience
To start, we asked about roles and responsibilities. Not surprisingly, 84% of participants were responsible for strategy/architecture, helped administer a virtualized environment or both. A solid 58% of the audience identified as having an administration role.
Insight: The rise of containers notwithstanding, VMworld continues to attract key IT architects
2016 Enterprise IT Priorities
We then dived into business/IT priorities. In addition to prioritizing cost reduction, an overwhelming 84% of respondents said infrastructure agility was priority or top priority, with 63% looking to leveraging open source. Our hypothesis is these are related: lack of vendor lock-in among other benefits of open source can help drive infrastructure agility. If you already know Platform9, you know we believe infrastructure is best managed using a SaaS model. If you haven’t read it yet, our CEO has written a blog about it here.
Insight: Cost-reduction and on-demand infrastructure access remain top priorities for the Enterprise
Public Cloud Traction
Next, even though we were surprised to see a minority participants listed public cloud as a priority despite continued cloud hype, including VMware’s Cross-Cloud Architecture announcement at VMworld, we still wanted to know more about which providers were most popular among this particular crowd. At first glance, AWS is a clear winner, with 48% of respondents using or testing it, but that’s actually quite low compared to its overall market share, greater than Google Cloud Platform or Azure combined.
Insight: OpenStack has nearly closed the gap vs VMware’s flagship product
Enterprise Cloud Platforms
Given how “cloud” dominates the enterprise IT conversation today, we were interested in understanding which cloud management platforms the VMworld audience was adopting. Not surprisingly, VMware’s own vRealize Automation leads the pack, with nearly 44% of the audience expressing interest in it. VMware’s now deprecated vCloud Director still has a significant presence with nearly 37% interest. This may indicate that vRealize Automation has not been seen a replacement for vCloud Director, either due to lack of feature parity or perhaps due to its price.
Somewhat surprisingly, OpenStack has closed the gap vs VMware’s flagship cloud platform, with nearly 36% interest.
Insight: Microsoft Azure is surprisingly close to AWS in Enterprise interest
Containers & Orchestration
With so much buzz around the growing need for container orchestrations frameworks, we wanted to learn more about which technologies this audience was evaluating.. Docker Swarm, the most well known (and inarguably easiest to pronounce) of the three frameworks was indeed the most researched & highest adopted among our group. Kubernetes has emerged as the clear alternative. Both Swarm and Kubernetes have seemingly opened up a significant leads vs Mesos, the original leader in this space.
Insight: Docker Swarm and Kubernetes are leading enterprise interest in containers. Mesos has lost traction vs previous years
Did you notice a trend or have insights to add? Please leave behind a comment or tweet us at @Platform9Sys. Thank you to all who participated in the survey.
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