A survey done by vendors, Bitnami, Cloud.com and Zenoss, shows that the user adoption of cloud computing is driven largely by needs for scalability and cost savings. The survey was conducted by these companies in the communities around their open source projects. The survey polled 500 IT professionals, 40 percent of whom were CTOs, architects and IT managers from a wide-range of organizations including government, education and enterprises. 68% of those polled say that the biggest attraction of cloud computing for them is the hardware cost savings, another 66% quote agility and 51% quote elasticity as attractions.
Some of the other interesting findings include:
- There is an overwhelming interest in cloud computing among organizations of various sizes and shapes. 61 percent of organizations are in the information gathering or planning stages or have an approved cloud computing strategy (but no implementation), 20 percent have cloud implementations and 20 percent have no cloud computing plans at this point
- Of the surveyed Chief Technical Officers, scalability (71 percent) was the most popular reason for adopting cloud computing followed by elasticity or the need to adjust to fluctuations in resource demands (61 percent)
- In spite of the predictions about the death or irrelevance of open source in a cloud based world, 69 percent of the cloud users are using open source software whenever possible while only 3 percent claim not to use open source software at all. All government users indicated some degree of open source usage
- Linux operating system is the dominant guest operating system in the cloud with 83 percent of IT professionals planning to deploy Linux as a guest operating system, 66 percent will be deploying Windows OSes in the cloud
There are some other interesting trends in the survey but I always take vendor driven surveys with a pinch of salt (well, bag full of salt 
). For those who are interested in knowing more about the survey, I am attaching the infographic below.
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