Organizations using OpenStack varied in size, and there was no specific company size that dominated the survey results. For instance, 26 percent of respondents represented companies of one to 20 employees, whereas 21 percent represented companies with more than 10,000 employees.

Information technology was the most dominant industry, according to the survey results. Of the respondents, 63 percent came from IT companies. The next highest market demographic was academic research, which made up 11 percent of respondents. But OpenStack is being used by a variety of industries, including telecommunications (7 percent), film/media (3 percent), government/defense (2 percent), manufacturing/industrial (2 percent), retail (1 percent), health care (1 percent) and finance (1 percent).

The top business driver was cost savings, followed by operational efficiency, open source technology, avoiding vendor lock-in and the flexibility of underlying technology choices.

The most-used OpenStack version is now Grizzly, which replaced Folsom as the most popular choice between April and November.

Most organizations using OpenStack are either in proof of concept or dev/QA stages, with the least amount actually using OpenStack in production.