This week, Forrester released The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Cost Management and Optimization, Q4 2020 report. In this article, we’ll take you through the vendor requirements, evaluation criteria, and key takeaways for cloud financial management and FinOps professionals.
This week, Forrester released The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Cost Management and Optimization, Q4 2020 report. If you’re not familiar, The Forrester Wave™ is a guide created by Forrester to help buyers evaluate a shortlist of vendors in order to make the right purchasing decisions for their business. Forrester’s research process takes several months, consisting of customer feedback, user need assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, with each vendor evaluated by the same set of criteria.
In this year’s Cloud Cost Management and Optimization report, Forrester selected eight vendors and evaluated them across 27 criteria. Of the vendors selected, we’re excited to share that CloudHealth by VMware was named a Leader!
VMware offers a leading platform for cloud-native and traditional enterprises.
Two other vendors were selected as Leaders, three as Strong Performers, one as a Contender, and one as a Challenger. To be included in the evaluation, vendors needed to meet certain baseline requirements:
- Vendor solution supports at least two public cloud platforms.
- Vendor solution has cloud cost monitoring, optimization, and recommendation capabilities.
- Vendor has at least 30 enterprise customers, or product revenue greater than or equal to $4 million USD.
- The product can be purchased as a standalone tool.
- Solution capabilities must be generally available as of July 20th, 2020.
Evaluation criteria
Each vendor was evaluated across 27 criteria that fall into three high-level categories: current offering, strategy, and market presence.
- Current offering: Includes criteria of access and permissions, resource discovery and cloud platform support, billing, cloud visibility, cost optimization, cost forecasting, and experience.
- Strategy: Includes criteria of product vision, market approach, partner ecosystem, commercial model, execution roadmap, and performance.
- Market presence: considers criteria of customers, product revenue, and market share.
Compared to the seven other vendors, CloudHealth by VMware had the highest score in each category—current offering, strategy, and market presence.
Key takeaways
From Forrester’s research there are a few key takeaways we’ve gathered:
- Mature solutions exceed native cloud platform capabilities by providing fine-tuned, accurate optimization recommendations across complex cloud environments, including multicloud, hybrid, containers, third-party solutions, and network data.
- Leading cloud cost management and optimization solutions differentiate with support beyond AWS and Microsoft Azure to include other cloud providers such as Google Cloud Platform and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
- Leaders can provide granular, contextualized dashboards to show amortized costs and forecasted spend, with the ability to categorize by tags, departments, or users.
Next steps
See the research for yourself! Download your copy of The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Cost Management and Optimization, Q4 2020 report today.
