The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) has just released the findings of a new survey of IOUG members that benchmarks the rapid evolution of cloud computing among Oracle users. The survey, consisting of responses from 267 IT professionals and data managers, was conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., and sponsored by Oracle.
The survey findings will be explained in detail during a webcast on Thursday, December 2, at 12 noon ET featuring Joe McKendrick, Unisphere Research analyst and report author, and Rex Wang, vice president, Oracle Product Marketing.
"This survey shows that cloud adoption is increasing and that more organizations are interested in private platform-as-a-service clouds," observes Wang.
According to the survey, 29% of respondents' organizations already have deployed an internal cloud, and 37% indicated some piece of their organization's workload processing or infrastructure is now available through private cloud services. In addition, private cloud implementation will be growing significantly over the next year.
With private cloud implementations, respondents highlighted emphasis on "platform as a service" (database and middleware capabilities). The survey also found that adoption of private cloud services for IT workload processing or infrastructure is outpacing the use of public platform service providers.
What are the challenges to implementing or managing a private cloud? Respondents are evenly split regarding the significance of many issues, but business and organizational issues are key ones that come to the fore. More than one out of four respondents cite issues with creating the business case and funding model, and a similar portion report issues with gaining cross-organization support or participation, as well as implementing process, policy, and role changes or transformation. In second place were more technical concerns such as provisioning servers, storage, or ensuring service levels.
In light of the growing need for virtualization and relevancy of the cloud to its members, the IOUG is offering a bootcamp at COLLABORATE11 - IOUG Forum to share real user insights and industry expert experiences about virtualization and cloud computing, states Andy Flower, president of the IOUG. Oracle technologists who would like additional resources, lessons learned, best practices and answers about virtualization and cloud computing should plan on attending the IOUG Virtualization Bootcamp at COLLABORATE11 - IOUG Forum where sessions will provide attendees with the basics and advancement of cloud computing.
The Executive Summary of the new IOUG ResearchWire report is publicly available from the IOUG, and the complete 33-page report is available to IOUG members as a benefit of membership, at the IOUG website.