Study: Oracle users have big private cloud plans

IDG News Service - While many Oracle customers are interested in running IT services on private clouds, most are still in the early stages of development, a new study from the Independent Oracle Users Group has found.

Some 267 IOUG members were surveyed in August by Unisphere Research for the study, which was underwritten by Oracle. It does not explicitly endorse any Oracle technologies for building private clouds, which in general refer to the use of virtualization, data center automation and other technologies to provide more efficient IT resource provisioning behind a firewall.

Nearly half of respondents are either running, planning or considering some type of private cloud. But only 11% of that total were running one "in production at scale," and 47% have no plans, results underscoring that despite strong interest in private clouds, the concept is still fairly nascent.

In addition, most respondents appear to be more comfortable developing private clouds on their own. Just 8% have tapped an outside provider to run private cloud services and another 11% are considering it.

Also, just 14% of respondents are using public cloud services such as Amazon Web Services, according to the study.

Companies are also having difficulty figuring out how to budget for private clouds. Only four in 10 have developed a funding mechanism, and the sources of money "tend to be all over the map," according to the study.

The largest subset of that group, constituting 18%, charges lines of business or departments based on resource usage or allocation. As private cloud deployments gain in maturity, more costs are assigned to the IT budget, the study found.

More than one quarter of the survey sample comes from organizations with 10,000 or more employees, but many small and midsized companies are represented as well, it states.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris's e-mail address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com