Forrester’s Frank Gillet just published results of a big survey on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS – like Amazon’s compute cloud or internal cloud-like datacenter) acceptance across geographies and company sizes titled “Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong About Cloud IaaS“.

As the title implies the survey has a few very interesting results.

First and foremost, they found that bigger customers are actually more willing to use IaaS than smaller companies – Frank attributes that to enterprises being more familiar with virtualization trends.

Public clouds are actually more popular than private (internal) ones – which in my mind is because there is simply too much confusion about what internal clouds are and technology not really being at the commodity level yet. Frank adds a very good point on inadequate positioning on internal clouds as pay-per-use, rather than self-service on-demand resources which makes the idea look less appealing.

Production use is as high as dev/test – actually this makes a lot of sense. In the early virtualization days it was mostly used in dev/test environments and only then got accepted for production systems. In my opinion, cloud computing is now piggy-backing on this virtualization success and thus jumping ahead right to the production acceptance.

Level of acceptance of cloud computing is approximately the same across geographies (e.g. US and Europe) but not across verticals (e.g. public sector lacking way behind retail – which again makes sense because the former has more regulatory concerns and the latter is used to supply chains and is all about efficiency.)

Overall, this is a very good report with lots of useful data. If you are a Forrester subscriber or have $1999 to spend go get it here.

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