A common rap against OpenStack is that the platform hasn't caught on with public clouds. But that's too U.S.-centric of a viewpoint, according to findings published by Forrester Research this week.

OpenStack is generally associated with private clouds. When it comes to public clouds, the platform hasn't had a great year, PR-wise. VMware scaled back its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) ambitions. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) sold its OpenStack assets to Linux provider SUSE. And Cisco recently announced the end of its Intercloud platform.

And of course, "public cloud" brings to mind the hyperscale market leaders that weren't built on OpenStack — particularly Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Even so, Forrester counted 21 public clouds that claim to be based on OpenStack. It pointed this out in a report published this week led by Lauren Nelson, Frank Liu, Paul Miller, and Sophia Vargas. The report, intended as a followup to October's OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, is being promoted by the OpenStack Foundation.

"The U.S. public cloud market has largely settled, but every other market is still in flux," the analysts write. "European and Asia Pacific cloud players will continue to gravitate to OpenStack because of its focus on multi-tenancy and developers."

The 21 public clouds include many that are run by big-name operations: China Mobile, China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Huawei, NTT, and ZTE all get name-checked in the report.

China Mobile even won the Summit's Superuser award for a deployment that spans more than 6,000 nodes. (The award has been given out five times, with four of them going to telecom providers.)