The vast majority of IT pros are keen to adopt OpenStack, but many are wary of the challenges in doing so, according to a new study sponsored by SUSE Linux.

The report, which was carried out by U.K. research firm Dynamic Markets Ltd., warns that positive sentiment about OpenStack could be washed away by pitfalls like the difficulty of installation, an acute fear of vendor lock-in, and the long-standing skills shortage.

Dynamic Markets interviewed 813 senior IT pros based in the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, Italy and Scandinavia for its survey, as well as 110 U.K.-based pros in an second group. According to SUSE, 88 percent of respondents said they’re either planning to, or have already deployed OpenStack-based private clouds. But most respondents remain wary of private cloud installation challenges and possible vendor lock-in.

The report also found that almost all those it surveyed (96 percent) said they would use a cloud-based platform for business-critical workloads, while 94 percent said they believe infrastructure-as-a-service is the future of the data center.

Even so, the old practicality problems associated with OpenStack once again reared their ugly head. Of the U.K. based IT pros, more than half of these said they’d tried and failed to implement an OpenStack cloud, while another 57 percent confessed to implementation being “difficult”. Moreover, 30 percent of those planning to deploy OpenStack could well face even more difficulties, as they plan to install the platforms themselves instead of securing the help of an established vendor. But although most IT pros realize going it alone will be difficult, their determination to do so can be explained by the fact that 91 percent of the U.K. respondents said they were worried about the prospect of vendor lock-in.

One of the biggest challenges for those enterprises that go it alone is that it’s almost impossible to get a hold of qualified staff necessary to install OpenStack and keep it up and running. The report says 89 percent of companies complained of a lack of available talent in the jobs market, and said this was making them reluctant to launch new private cloud projects.

While OpenStack seems to have a bright future, SUSE’s senior product marketing manager Mark Smith said enterprises have clear concerns about how to integrate and manage it within their infrastructures. What with costs being one of the main drivers of cloud adoption in general, many IT pros are worried that OpenStack will prove to be expensive in the long-run, SUSE concluded.

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