Hosting, Cloud Firms Experienced Growth in Q1 2016: OnApp Survey
Online service providers are responding to the competitive threat from hyperscale public cloud providers not by specializing, primarily, but rather by diversifying their offerings, according to new research released Tuesday by OnApp. The Global Service Provider Survey for Q1 2016 provides data about a wide range of hosting and cloud topics, some expected, some surprising, and some contradictory.
A notable contradiction is that while 44 percent of service providers plan to add hybrid cloud services, only 7 percent of customers expect to buy hybrid services this year, and 72 percent say they “don’t care” about hybrid. At first glance this would seem to fly in the face of research released in January by IDG and EMC in which a huge majority of respondents said they would have hybrid cloud environments within three years. That survey was confined to enterprises, however, as opposed to the more general Global Service Provider Survey, which found that individuals and small office/home office (or “SOHO”) customers are the biggest group of customers for providers in the Americas.
In terms of overall growth, almost one-third of cloud providers say they experienced “amazing growth,” while none shrank. Roughly half of hosting providers experienced “moderate growth.”
OnApp found itself the most popular platform, with 65 percent of service providers as customers. VMware has 35 percent, followed by Virtuozzo and OpenStack at 13 percent each, and CloudStack at 6 percent. A further 24 percent run one or two platforms.
A strong majority of both service providers (79 percent) and customers (86 percent) say support is a main reason for provider choice, while price was selected by just over half on each side. Ease-of-use, however, is an important reason for choosing their service provider according to 91 percent, and the same portion of service providers agree. The survey shows that service providers generally have a good understanding of what their customers care about.
SEE ALSO: Is Hybrid Cloud the Future of Enterprise IT?
When asked what has stopped customers from buying their services, 18 percent say a lack of cloud functionality was a big problem, ahead of price and “cloud fear/uncertainty/doubt” (15 percent). Vendor tie-in is sometimes a problem for half of service providers surveyed, while legislation is considered easily the least problem among the 11 choices provided.
While AWS is commonly seen as a major threat, local competitors are considered the top threat by a quarter of service providers, and Digital Ocean (22 percent) is named just as often as AWS.
Overall, service providers are optimistic, with 70 percent feeling positive about the future, and more feeling neutral (18 percent) than worried (13 percent).
Source: TheWHIR