This week, Forrester released The Forrester Wave™: Hybrid Cloud Management, Q4 2020 report. In this article, we’ll take you through the vendor requirements, evaluation criteria, and key takeaways for hybrid cloud management and operations professionals.
It’s been an exciting season of Forrester reports! This week, Forrester published The Forrester Wave™: Hybrid Cloud Management, Q4 2020 report, which is developed to help buyers evaluate a short list of hybrid cloud management providers in order to make the right decision for their business needs.
In this year’s report, Forrester evaluated nine vendors across 34 criteria. Of the vendors invited to participate, we’re excited to share that VMware was named a Leader!
VMware offers a leading platform that extends management from private to public.
Hybrid cloud management
Before diving into the report, I thought it would be helpful to provide some context for hybrid cloud management and what exactly this entails. Depending on who you ask, the term hybrid cloud may have a number of definitions. However, in Now Tech: Hybrid Cloud Management, Q4 2020, Forrester defines hybrid cloud management as: “A software stack that delivers governance, visibility, lifecycle management, and optimization insights for multiple clouds across both public and private environments.”
To learn more about hybrid cloud management, we recommend the following resources:
- Demystifying Hybrid Cloud Management
- The Enterprise Guide to Hybrid Cloud
- Hybrid Cloud Migration Assessment
- What is a Hybrid Cloud Model?
Given the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the increased focus on digital enablement and agility, businesses are accelerating adoption of the public cloud and taking advantage of the benefits of a hybrid cloud and/or multicloud strategy. With respect to cloud management platforms, the Forrester report states that the “rising momentum and the increasing scale of hybrid cloud and multicloud environments have made the choice of investment no longer optional but necessary…”
The Forrester Wave™: Hybrid Cloud Management Report is meant to help businesses make the right choice for their business in order to reap the greatest reward from their cloud investment. So let’s dive deeper into the report to see what it takes for a vendor to be included in the report and how they were evaluated.
Inclusion criteria
In addition to VMware, one other vendor was selected as a Leader, four as Strong Performers, two as Contenders, and one as a Challenger. To be included in the evaluation, vendors needed to meet certain baseline requirements:
- Core capabilities in multicloud management across workloads, including application, infrastructure, and health information, orchestration, native provisioning, multicloud billing, cost visibility and predictive analysis, as well as security and governance policy creation and enforcement.
- Revenue above or equal to US $10 million for FY 2019, with at least 150 customers.
- Support for AWS, Azure, and vSphere-based clouds by July 24, 2020.
- General availability as of July 24, 2020.
- Can be purchased as a standalone tool.
- Interest from Forrester’s client base in the form of mentions or inquiries in the last 12 months.
Evaluation criteria
Each vendor was evaluated across 34 criteria that fall into three high-level categories: current offering, strategy, and market presence.
- Current offering: Indicates the strength of the solution’s current offering, based on discovery capabilities, governance and policies, visibility, orchestration and lifecycle management, optimization and automated operations, and experience.
- Strategy: Indicates the strength of the vendor’s strategy, based on product vision, execution roadmap, market approach, partner ecosystem, commercial model, and performance.
- Market presence: Reflects each vendor’s number of customers, product revenue, and average deal size.
For this report, VMware was evaluated based on its combined solutions: CloudHealth, vRealize Suite 2019, and vRealize Network Insight (vRNI). VMware had the highest score in each category—current offering, strategy, and market presence.
Reference customers gave high marks for [VMware’s] completeness of features and usability, cross-platform support, multicloud cost visibility, and support services.
Key takeaways
From Forrester’s research, we’ve gathered a few key takeaways:
- Leading hybrid cloud management solutions support a breadth of cloud platforms and services with a depth of features within each, including lifecycle management, discovery, performance visibility, cost visibility and optimization, and tag management. Ultimately, however, buyers should select a solution that, at a minimum, offers the platform support and capabilities that meet their specific needs.
- Leading solutions offer customers flexibility by offering multiple options to solve a single problem. Since most hybrid cloud management customers make purchasing decisions after already having made choices about their cloud infrastructure, providers, and services, a leading solution will be able to support and enable these choices, rather than forcing the customer into a different route.
- Mature hybrid cloud management solutions provide advanced optimization and automated operations. Beyond baseline optimization capabilities (identifying waste, recommending reservations and discounts), leading solutions differentiate with capabilities for rightsizing, triggering actions based on a broad set of data, and automatically filtering through alerts to identify critical issues.
Next steps
See the research for yourself! Download your copy of The Forrester Wave™: Hybrid Cloud Management, Q4 2020 report today.
And if you’re looking for even more insights from Forrester, you can also download The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Cost Management and Optimization, Q4 2020 report, published in October (spoiler alert: CloudHealth by VMware is named a Leader in this one too!).
