New Zealand Linux

Not to over-inflate the horse race nature of the cloud computing space right now, but this is an exciting time to watch the action as open source projects seek to compete with giants such as Amazon and the telcos. This week’s Open Cloud Roundup of top stories illustrates just how much the industry is heating up this year, with The Linux Foundation’s announcement of a new CloudOpen conference and OpenStack’s recent accumulation of big-name partners. The week also turned up an interesting “how-to” and a product launch for building your own private cloud with Debian.

With the Linux Foundation Enterprise End User Summit coming up on April 30, we revisited the data collected for our Linux Adoption Trends report to find some of the global trends among enterprise Linux users.

While the report published in January focused on large enterprises with more than $500 million in sales or 500+ employees, this previously unreleased data highlights regional trends among enterprise users in Europe and Asia.

For the most part the regional data showed similar patterns of adoption with large enterprise users. But one result in particular stood out.

More than 34 percent of 257 organizations surveyed in Asia cited finding trained developers and/or systems administrators as the top factor impeding Linux from having more success. That’s about double the percentage of large enterprises (17.6 percent) and European enterprises (16.3 percent) that listed finding talent as the top impediment.

Contrast these results with those of a recent Dice report that show demand for Linux skills in the job market reached a new high in April and you begin to see the need for more Linux training, especially in Asia. The data also jibes with Randstad Technologies manager Chris Mader’s suggestion that a huge opportunity awaits IT staffing agencies in Asia.

This data just scratches the surface of emerging trends in Linux enterprise use. For more insight and information on enterprise Linux we recommend attending the Enterprise End User Summit April 30 – May 1 in New York. The event is also an opportunity to meet other users such as Chicago Mercantile Exchange

With the OpenStack Folsom Design Summit happening this week, much of the open cloud news has revolved around OpenStack’s growing list of partners and analysis of the open source platform’s role in the overall cloud ecosystem. Here are six stories featuring OpenStack, its partners and its prospects.

NOTE: This round-up of open cloud headlines is a new weekly feature on Linux.com. What were your top open cloud stories of the past week? Please let us know in the comments, below, or email editor Libby Clark, lclark (at) linuxfoundation.org.