Calling it “the de facto standard for the private cloud market,” analysis from Forrester Research highlights OpenStack’s expanding adoption — and who should get on board now.

Addressing infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders, a team of analysts led the four-page brief with takeaways from the Barcelona Summit celebrating the latest release, Newton. Global telcos adopting Neutron and contributing tools like Doctor are an “encouraging sign for enterprises seeking more-established enterprise grade credibility in Neutron,” they note. In the report titled “OpenStack’s Global Traction Expands For Its Newton Release,” analysts said they expect “rapid improvement” in networking project Neutron, formerly one of the most complained-about elements in OpenStack. You can download the full report for a limited time, here.

Who should jump aboard the OpenStack train now?

Forrester says, choose OpenStack now if:

You’re headquartered outside the United States

“European and Asia Pacific cloud players will continue to gravitate to OpenStack because of its focus on multitenancy and developers… thus, pros at firms headquartered outside North America can be confident they’ll have the ecosystem of local providers they need to support their OpenStack efforts.”

You’re outside Fortune 100 and in high-tech

“If you’re an I&O leader from an auto, oil and gas, or manufacturing firm with headquarters outside the US; you’re looking for lower cost and greater flexibility; and you’re willing to invest time and talent, this is your chance.” They emphasize that the community is ready to welcome newcomers and will offer “above and beyond” support.

You want to choose your own (container) adventure…

Forrester admits that it’s hard to predict which layers of the private cloud stack will survive, so flexibility is a must. “The OpenStack Foundation’s challenge is deciding where to build versus where to connect to other open source projects… Thus, Magnum will remain a project within OpenStack but will also integrate with other container projects.” That leaves the choice up to you; Magnum now links up to other orchestration cluster tools, including Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and Mesos.

Tags: analyst report