ARMONK, N.Y., May 20, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) is the most popular provider of hosted private cloud according to a survey from independent research firm Forrester Research. IBM hosted private cloud solutions are preferred twice as much as competitive offerings.

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Forrester Research found that more than twice as many firms use or plan to use IBM as their primary hosted private cloud platform, and nearly twice as many firms use or plan to use IBM when implementing multiple vendor cloud solutions, compared to the next closest competitor in the survey.

The report, "Adoption Profile: Hosted Private Cloud, North America and Europe, Q3 2014,"(1) was based on a survey of 2,255 business and technology decision-makers.

Forrester defines hosted private cloud as a category of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) where the solution lives off-premises in a hosted environment and compute resources are dedicated and isolated for customers.

The survey also reported that the top drivers in choosing to adopt hosted private cloud include improved IT infrastructure and flexibility, lower total cost of ownership for servers, on-demand capacity and scalability, and improved disaster recovery and business continuity.

One concern for choosing to adopt hosted private cloud according to the report was vendor lock-in. The report found that "standards like OASIS's TOSCA and open source projects like OpenStack provide enterprises the future hope of less lock-in and greater adherence to standards."

IBM is a leading supporter of open cloud computing and a key contributor of code for OpenStack Integrated Projects and Cloud Foundry.

IBM total cloud revenue - covering public, private and hybrid engagements - was $7.7 billion over the previous 12 months at the end of March 2015; it grew more than 60 percent in first quarter 2015. IBM's cloud delivered as a service business, a subset of the total, includes IaaS.

For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud. Follow us on Twitter at @IBMcloud and on our blog at www.thoughtsoncloud.com. Join the conversation #ibmcloud.

(1) - Forrester Research, "Adoption Profile: Hosted Private Cloud, North America and Europe, Q3 2014," May 4, 2015 by Lauren E. Nelson with Michael Caputo, Glenn O'Donnell

Media Contact:
Liz Campbell
IBM Media Relations
Phone: +1 781-820-9840
Email: lcampbell@us.ibm.com

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SOURCE IBM