As the interest of Chinese organizations to adopt cloud solutions for business transformation is increasing, OpenStack-based cloud solutions have become the hot topic in the China market in 2014. I believe that 2015 will be the key year for OpenStack and it will rapidly develop in China. Here’s why:

  • Government policy support. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) of China held the first China Open Source & Cloud Computing Summit (COSCCS) on December 11. At this event, the Chinese government for the first time officially declared its intention to support OpenStack ecosystems and encourage state-owned enterprises (SOE) to use OpenStack-based cloud products: “…through OpenStack, we can contribute to a good business model…” said the deputy minister of MIIT. Forrester believes that there will be more and more Chinese SOEs and local governments that will invest in OpenStack-based cloud project in 2015.
  • OpenStack is mature as a private cloud solution. With the launch of the Juno version in October 2014, OpenStack addressed many upgrade concerns, making it easier to roll back a failed deployment and ensure thorough cleanup. It also added a record 3,219 bug fixes and enterprise features, such as storage policies, provisioning of Hadoop and Spark, as well as network functions virtualization (NFV). Another specific advantage is that Chinese organizations are not facing the challenge to upgrade from early releases of OpenStack because the China market started deployment of OpenStack mostly from 2014 onwards.
  • Vendor ecosystems are getting better in the China market. Today, OpenStack’s community includes eight platinum members, 17 gold members, 89 corporate sponsors, and 330 supporting organizations. In China, more and more local vendors are joining in OpenStack foundations and developing solutions based on OpenStack, such as Huawei (became the gold member in 2013), UnitedStack, and Inspur. It’s very helpful to build up ecosystem around OpenStack in China. For example, Huawei works with Red Hat and aims to accelerate collaboration around OpenStack for NFV, which is required by communication service providers (CSPs). In addition, Huawei plans to launch two new versions of its cloud solutions based on OpenStack in 2015. SUSE is the major sponsor of the first COSCCS and demonstrated its localization strategy of SUSE Cloud 4 in China. SUSE will focus on approaching their existing Linux customers to use its SUSE cloud’s product portfolio, such as SUSE Manager, a tool that could deliver comprehensive management of guest Linux workloads running in both public and private clouds.
  • Local customers start to adopt OpenStack in business environments. Today, there are many Chinese organizations that use OpenStack across various industries, such as Internet (e.g. iQiyi, and Qihoo 360), telecom (e.g. China Telecom Guangzhou Research Center), education (e.g. Zhejiang University), retail (e.g. Suning Cloud Commerce), and information technology (e.g. MicroChild) verticals. Customers are scaling up their OpenStack environments to support more applications, which could be good references for other Chinese organizations. 

And of course, you can also use CloudStack-based solutions and other commercial software such as VMware vCloud Suite. Please refer to my Dynamics Of China’s Private Cloud Market report for more details. Do you think OpenStack will eventually rule the cloud market in China?