Jonas Boner of Akka fame gave a very interesting talk at one of the Scala meetups in S.F. last year. He said he'd fallen in love with Erlang but over time had to grudgingly admit it was just too hard to convince people to deploy it. The Akka project was an attempt to bring some of the key Erlang concepts over to a more commercially palatable platform (the JVM).
I'd love to see Erlang really take root but the story of his experience wasn't encouraging.
Erlang deployment (IMHO) has never been easier: see rebar. It's trivial for a layperson to not only deploy/distribute Erlang applications, but also deploy the hot code upgrades. See: https://github.com/basho/rebar
I'd love to see Erlang really take root but the story of his experience wasn't encouraging.