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Revenues from OpenStack business models will surpass $5 billion (£4.08bn) by 2020 and grow at a CAGR of 35%, according to the latest figures from 451 Research.

The numbers, which are being released to coincide with the day before the latest OpenStack Summit, puts the exact figure at $5.7bn by 2020, from $4.6bn the previous year and $3.5bn in 2018.

“We continue to believe the market is still in the early stages of enterprise use and revenue generation,” said Al Sadowski, research vice president at 451 Research. “We expect an uptick in revenues from all sectors and geographic regions, especially from those companies in the OpenStack Products and Distributions category that are targeting enterprises.”

451 Research argues the primary area where OpenStack will see success is in the private cloud space.

Alongside more traditional use cases, such as DevOps, platform as a service (PaaS) and big data, the research firm sees significant benefits with regard to software defined networking (SDN), network function virtualisation (NFV), mobile, and the Internet of Things.

The primary user base, according to the research firm, remains enterprises looking to deploy cloud-native applications in private cloud environments, with “limited” appeal for organisations who are already using hyperscale cloud providers, as well as on legacy applications.

These figures make for interesting reading alongside those put out by OpenStack themselves earlier this month. According to data taken from the OpenStack user base, containers – cited by 78% of respondents – SDN and NFV (61%) and bare metal (56%). are the primary technologies of interest going forward.

451 warns that while container software is ‘mostly’ beneficial and complementary to OpenStack, “persistent attention to containers and their management threatens to eclipse OpenStack, similar to how OpenStack surpassed its rival CloudStack in mindshare and then market share.”