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TROY, Mich., Oct. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Forty-four percent of U.S. executives aim to tackle current IT challenges through leveraging cloud solutions, and they are planning to invest more in cloud computing in the future. That is the finding of an IDC survey commissioned by T-Systems. Corporations expect cloud computing to deliver lower IT costs (26 percent) and to enable them to replace legacy systems (21 percent) and adopt new applications more flexibly (14 percent).

"As the U.S. cloud services market continues to mature, enterprises find that overall business impact and productivity gains from the cloud are as significant as achieving cost reductions," said David Tapper, IDC VP Outsourcing and Offshore Services Market Research. Cloud computing is seen as most likely to deliver solutions for Customer Relationship Management (31 percent), productivity tools like email, collaboration or Office packages (28 percent), online stores, and Enterprise Relationship Management (26 percent each).

Corporations continue to have reservations about security, but they are no longer the decisive criterion against cloud. The concept of security now extends to issues such as how cloud computing will impact compliance requirements or data availability. That is prompting corporations to consider the right cloud type and cloud service needed. Enterprises see an opportunity in the private cloud for providers to fulfill their security requirements and agree on service level agreements. 40 percent of U.S. respondents have implemented a private cloud strategy while only 13 percent are relying on public cloud and 16 percent on hybrid cloud solutions.

In the course of adopting cloud computing, enterprises are increasingly considering new service providers, and they are also considering providers whose services they have not previously used. In ERP more than half are considering providers with whom they have had no previous experience. "CEOs," Tapper said, "are ranked as most significant in the decision-making process on using clouds. The result is that buyers are viewing cloud as strategic in achieving critical business objectives for which CIOs and IT vendors must ensure that their cloud solutions help achieve these objectives and associated business benefits."

"The survey results validate that one of the greatest needs in deploying cloud-based solutions is to find the right partner who can assist with the question of cloud readiness and bring forward a clear plan on how to migrate to the cloud," said T-Systems North America Managing Director Heike Auerbach. "T-Systems has been migrating and managing complex applications to the cloud for more than seven years longer than any other IT service provider. It was gratifying for us to see that customers profoundly value an experienced partner as they make the journey to the cloud."

For the cloud survey commissioned by T-Systems, IDC asked CIOs and other top IT managers of 104 U.S. corporations in the summer of 2012 how they now rated cloud computing. IDC conducted the same interviews in the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, the UK and Brazil.

IDC analysts and T-Systems cloud experts are presenting the survey findings and the latest cloud solutions in free webcasts. The live webcast for the U.S. market will take place at 2 p.m. Eastern Time on October 18. To register, contact http://www.t-systems.com/webcast.

About T-Systems

Drawing on a global infrastructure of data centers and networks, T-Systems operates information and communication technology (ICT) systems for multinational corporations and public sector institutions. As Deutsche Telekom's corporate customer arm, T-Systems provides integrated solutions for the networked future of business and society. Some 48,200 employees at T-Systems combine industry expertise with ICT innovations to add significant value to customers' core business all over the world. The corporate customers unit generated revenue of more than $12 billion US dollars in the 2011 financial year. http://www.t-systemsus.com.

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IDC Survey: U.S. Corporations Aim to Tackle IT Challenges with Cloud Computing

The open source cloud computing market has been heating up in the last year with momentum for OpenStack building, Citrix CloudStack spinning out of OpenStack to be its own project and Eucalyptus slowly gaining tractions. But a new report from cloud management company Zenoss finds slow adoption of these open source platforms so far.

In the survey of more than 600 members of Zenoss' open source community, fewer than 1 in 5, 18%, said they have deployed an open source cloud management platform. Maturity of the projects, lack of support and security were the top-cited reasons for the lack of adoption.

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OPENSTACK GETS NO LOVE: Gartner report slams OpenStack

Of users that do deploy open source cloud platforms, OpenStack is the most commonly deployed platform, claiming almost 50% market share among these users surveyed. The project, backed by Rackspace, HP, Dell, IBM, Cisco and other tech heavyweights, has come under some criticism recently from Gartner. The project recently released its sixth version of the OpenStack code.

CloudStack, which is backed by Citrix but managed by the Apache Software Foundation, is the second most popular with 19% of adoption, followed by Eucalyptus at below 10%. Despite the low adoption rates, 43% of respondents said they are thinking about deploying an open source cloud in the future.

The report notes some other interesting figures about overall cloud adoption, finding that VMware is the dominant hypervisor in the enterprise, powering three-quarters of virtualized environments. KVM, Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen each followed in terms of their prominence, with about one-fifth of respondents noting they use those hypervisors. Only 16% also said they were using a platform as a service (PaaS), although 30% of those who said they are not said they are interested. As a comparison, another recent survey of more than 750 respondents by North Bridge Venture Capital partner Michael Skok found that 82% of users were using a software as a service (SaaS) application. A Gartner report recently found that SaaS has by far the most investments in it so far, with it being a $14 billion industry compared to the $6 billion infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market and the $1.2 billion PaaS market.

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.

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Open source cloud computing slow to catch on, survey finds