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Propelled by a 35% compound annual growth rate, Open Stack revenues will top $5 billion by 2020, according to 451 Research.
While OpenStack's potential growth rate is strong, 451 Research noted that its overall revenue was relatively small when compared to market leaders such as VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) and Amazon Web Services Inc.
Most OpenStack-based revenue to date has largely been from service providers' multi-tenant infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings, but private cloud revenue will exceed public cloud by 2019, according to 451 Research.
OpenStack's value going forward will be in the private cloud space, and in providing orchestration for public cloud integration with on-premises and hosted OpenStack environments.
While there are numerous organizations across most vertical sectors running mission-critical workloads with OpenStack , 451 Research said in general that it's still largely a platform for test and development environments, web hosting and pilot projects.
In addition to traditional use cases -- such as big data, DevOps, PaaS -- 451 Research said other use-case avenues for OpenStack going forward could include software-defined networking, network functions virtualization, mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) deployments by both service providers and enterprises.
Container software, such as Docker, will also be complementary to OpenStack, even though containers and their management cloud eclipse it, similar to how OpenStack leapfrogged its rival CloudStack in market share.
"This year OpenStack has become a top priority and credible cloud option, but it still has its shortcomings," said Al Sadowski, research vice president at 451 Research. "We continue to believe the market is still in the early stages of enterprise use and revenue generation. We expect an uptick in revenues from all sectors and geographic regions, especially from those companies in the OpenStack products and distributions category that are targeting enterprises."
The report by 451 Research was released ahead of this week's OpenStack Summit in Barcelona this week. Light Reading's Mitch Wagner wrote about two OpenStack projects as part of his coverage of the OpenStack Summit. (See OpenStack Goes Inside Atoms, Across Galaxy.)
— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation
