The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) has released results of its third annual membership survey which highlights continuous growth in the adoption of cloud computing from Alliance members.

The 2013 annual ODCA membership survey, which collected information from 124 members, revealed that 31% of respondents are running at least 40% of their IT operations in an internal cloud .

This figure is expected to grow to 70% of respondents by 2016.

A total of 74% of respondents are already using or plan to use ODCA’s usage model requirements in requests for proposals in the next six months- up from 63% in 2012.

The 2013 annual ODCA membership survey also found that:

- 52% of respondents are proactively working to integrate cloud requirements into application development plans, while another 27% are actively discussing how to optimize applications for the cloud.

- Two-thirds of members stated interest in participating in proof of concept testing of solutions that meet the requirements of ODCA usage models.

- Among the leading usage model targets for member adoption are: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) (86%), service orchestration (49%), virtual machine interoperability (48%), service catalog (39%) and scale out storage (39%). 

- Information-as-a-Service has emerged as a focus for enterprise procurements, with 29% of all members integrating ODCA requirements into their purchasing decisions.

The ODCA’s chairman and VP of IT infrastructure at BMW Mario Mueller said the “ODCA was founded to accelerate cloud adoption through a unified voice on customer requirements.”

“With three-quarters of our members having made or planning to make purchases based on ODCA usage models, the alliance is proving that unified requirements accelerate enterprise cloud adoption,” Mueller said.