On May 30, 2018, Forrester published the Cloud Cost Monitoring and Optimization Wave, then just over a week later, they published another Wave tackling a related subject: Hybrid Cloud Management. When Forrester releases two Wave reports within two weeks, both tackling the subjects of cloud management and optimization, there is bound to be some confusion. While the two reports do cover very closely-linked topics, there are many key differences in the scope and content of the Waves you need to consider. Let’s dive in a little deeper and explore these.
The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Cost Monitoring and Optimization, Q2 2018
According to Forrester, evaluated vendors must have the core capabilities of cloud cost monitoring, optimization, and remediation, including the following base features:
- Bill monitoring
- Instance rightsizing recommendations
- Reserved instance management
- Role-based access controls
- Ability to generate custom alerting and reports
- Cost monitoring
- Cost optimization and recommendation features
Cloud Cost Monitoring was not always a standalone segment, Forrester writes: “While cloud cost is often included in multi-platform management tools—e.g., hybrid cloud management (HCM) tools—a standalone market dedicated to cloud cost monitoring and optimization continues to thrive.” Cloud cost monitoring and optimization solutions are built-for-purpose platforms that focus narrowly on doing a few capabilities with significant depth.
The Forrester Wave™: Hybrid Cloud Management, Q2 2018
In order to be included in this Forrester Wave, vendors need to have “core capabilities in multi-cloud management across workloads”, which according to Forrester includes:
- Monitoring
- Brokerage
- Provisioning
- Template creation
- Orchestration
Optimization is not specifically called out in this definition, but it is one of the areas of evaluation in the report.
Inclusion Criteria and Players
The Cloud Cost Monitoring and Optimization Wave included nine vendors. Of these, four were named leaders, three were named strong performers, and two were named contenders. The Hybrid Cloud Management Wave included 12 vendors. Of these, four were named leaders, six were named strong performers, and one was named a contender. Interestingly, although the two solution areas are closely linked, only three vendors were evaluated in both Waves, one of them being CloudHealth Technologies.
When it came to inclusion criteria, the primary difference involved the core capabilities, which align to the definitions described above. One interesting difference also stands out: Although Cloud Cost Monitoring and Optimization is a newer market, the revenue for inclusion was set $2.5M higher than it was for Hybrid Cloud Management.
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. For these two Waves, the strategy and market presence sections were relatively similar, both looking at considerations such as product vision, market approach, partner ecosystem, and commercial model. The HCM Wave also included criteria on execution road map, which looks at the vendor’s track record for delivering what they promised. This makes sense in a Wave that has been repeated multiple times.
The Evaluation Criteria
The current offering criteria differs more substantially, however.
While these might seem similar at the surface, when digging in, each of these Waves focuses in on different areas of a certain topic. For example, under “Cloud service administration and governance,” the HCM Wave evaluates the following sub-criteria:
- Administrator usability and experience
- End user usability and experience
- Depth of templates and designer usability
- Breadth of template library
- Permissions
- Directory services integration
- Quotas and incentives
- Compliance tracking
Whereas the CCMO Wave looks at these slightly different sub-criteria:
- Directory services integration and permissions
- Billing and reporting
- Quotas and incentives
- Policy engine and decision trigger automation
It’s also worth noting that in the HCM Wave, this particular criteria was weighted at 30%, while the CCMO Wave weighted it at 15%. We think this example demonstrates how each of these evaluations take somewhat different approaches of evaluating similar criteria, each emphasizing the areas that are most critical for that market.
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