Another week, and another Forrester Wave! This week, Forrester published The Forrester Wave™: Hybrid Cloud Management, Q2 2018 report. In order to be included in this Forrester Wave, vendors have to have “a multipurpose suite that provides a variety of cloud management capabilities across monitoring, brokerage, provisioning, template creation, orchestration, etc. This suite must provide management for generic workloads, and not just specialize in the management of a specific workload, infrastructure type, or vertical.”
In their inclusion criteria for the report, Forrester also states that a solution must provide cost monitoring and optimization insights for AWS, Azure, and vSphere-based clouds by January 1, 2018. Now that you know what it is, let’s explore the types of players in the market.
(Related Report: The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Cost Monitoring And Optimization, Q2 2018)
Still confused about what exactly hybrid cloud management is? Forrester published a helpful graphic in one of their other reports, “Top 10 Facts Every Tech Leader Should Know About Hybrid Cloud” (see below).
Still confused about what exactly hybrid cloud management is? Forrester published a helpful graphic in one of their other reports, “Top 10 Facts Every Tech Leader Should Know About Hybrid Cloud.”
Our Take: Hybrid Cloud Management 1.0 and 2.0
In a murky landscape that Forrester admits was initially “slow to take off,” we believe that two categories of vendors take shape: the HCM 1.0 vendors and the HCM 2.0 vendors. The 1.0 vendors are primarily focused on trying to control the entire lifecycle of provisioning, orchestration, optimization, and end of life of VMs and workloads. These solutions focus heavily on provisioning portals where developers must go to launch new infrastructure. The 2.0 vendors are less focused on the provisioning and end of life, and more focused on orchestration, automation, and optimization of business services and cloud services. This allows engineers to be more productive, using their preferred provisioning tools. This doesn’t mean a complete breakdown in control: HCM 2.0 vendors offer guardrails to ensure optimization and compliance to corporate standards.
HCM 1.0 Solutions
HCM 2.0 Solutions
Focused on VMs and workloads
Focused on business and cloud services
Analysis on workload placement and optimization of placement
Service optimization — automation and optimization of a specific service or set of services supporting a business outcome
Must provision through HCM solution
May provision through HCM solution, or via engineer’s preferred approach
Inline optimization and governance
Inline or out of band optimization and governance
There are valid offerings from both 1.0 and 2.0 vendors, as we believe are evidenced from this evaluation. CloudHealth sits firmly in the camp of 2.0, believing that optimizing only at the workload level will increasingly be a relic in our past, and that provisioning, deploying, optimizing and managing business and cloud services is the future. In the Forrester Wave, most of the emerging 2.0 vendors were new to this year’s evaluation, and most were in the Strong Performers category. CloudHealth was among the Strong Performers in the evaluation, receiving among the highest score in the product vision, and number of customers criteria. We’re excited to be included in this group of the 12 most significant vendors, especially as a newer entrant into this market.
Evaluating the Players
Let’s dive into the criteria that Forrester deems important for your vendor selection process. They break criteria into three sections: current offering, strategy, and market presence. Current offering and strategy make up the X and Y axis that plot a vendor’s place on the Wave. One thing I really appreciate about the Wave is the rigorous methodology behind it that allows you to see exactly why vendors are ranked and placed where they are. You can even download a Wave scorecard and change the weightings to get your own customized vendor shortlist.
Here’s a high level look at what was considered for each criteria type:
Current offering. Forrester rated vendor solutions across a variety of functional categories including: cloud platform resources supported; automation and orchestration; cloud service administration and governance; cloud optimization; cloud monitoring; integrations and APIs; and support services. Each category is based on the scores of its subattributes, which can be viewed in the attached spreadsheet.
Strategy. Forrester evaluated vendor strategy across product vision, execution road map, market approach, partner ecosystem, and commercial model. Under product vision, Forrester evaluated planned enhancements relative to each vendor’s market approach and the vendor’s current strengths and weaknesses. We looked at the execution road map of each to vendor’s ability to complete planned enhancements in the next 12 months. Market approach evaluated the vendor’s view of the market and vision for how to best market and develop their solution. Partner ecosystem explored the vendor’s channel, and its breadth and depth of partnerships. Commercial model explored pricing models available and those most commonly used by its customers.
Market presence. These values were determined by a combination of customer base, product revenue, and technology spend under management as a measure of implementation size and customer usage.
You don’t need to take it from me, head over to Forrester’s website to give the report a read for yourself. The report is available to Forrester subscribers or for purchase. You can also download your copy of the other report: The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Cost Monitoring And Optimization, Q2 2018 here.
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The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Cost Monitoring And Optimization, Q2 2018
