Revenue from OpenStack, the open source software platform for cloud computing, will likely top $5 billion by 2020 and grow at a 35 percent compounded annual growth rate, according to 451 Research. While that growth rate is strong, the platform’s overall revenue is still fairly small compared to that of market leaders like VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS), the firm said.

451 Research said that most of OpenStack’s revenue so far has come from service providers that offer multitenant infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) but that the private cloud revenue will increase and surpass public cloud revenue by 2019. The company based its forecast on the fact that there are several organizations in different vertical sectors that are running workloads on OpenStack.

Other potential business areas for OpenStack include use cases that involve mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) and are being developed by both service providers and enterprises, 451 Research says.

Meanwhile, container software, such as Docker, will be complementary to OpenStack, 451 Research says, even though there is some fear that containers and their management could eclipse OpenStack, similar to the way OpenStack surpassed its rival CloudStack in marketshare.

451 Research released this latest report on OpenStack in advance of the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona this week. Earlier this month, OpenStack debuted OpenStack Newton, the 14th major release of the open source cloud framework.