Cisco Cisco Server Provisioner Livre blanc

For InFrastructure & operatIons proFessIonals 

the Forrester Wave™: private cloud solutions, Q4 2013

4

© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

November 25, 2013 

environments. Within these more expansive cloud suites, functionality can typically be accessed 

through the portal and, in some cases, without signing in again. However, the ITSM interface 

itself remains separate and typically requires additional training. As tools continue to develop, 

these additional products will be more cleanly wrapped into the product such that there’s a 

single interface regardless of the task.

Hybrid cloud falls short. The term “hybrid cloud” encompasses a range of scenarios, from a 

basic level where a cloud environment is used in addition to but separately from any number of 

traditional IT environments to a more advanced scenario in which all IT resources, both cloud 

and noncloud, are managed, moved, split, and expanded through a single management portal 

spanning multiple deployment types. While the latter is the goal of most IT pros, current 

solutions have relatively basic hybrid-cloud-enabling features. Enterprises generally view and 

manage their internal physical, private cloud, and public cloud resources as separate 

environments and use each for different workload types. Today, most vendors don’t support 

movement of workloads between environments once deployed or allow for hybrid cloud 

application design. Support for “hybrid” is typically limited to provisioning or migrating 

workloads to Amazon Web Services. Workload-bursting scenarios are possible but require some 

development today. If you’re looking to achieve advanced levels of hybrid cloud and cloud-

bursting capabilities, it will likely be two to three more years before this is available out of the box.

To assess the state of the private cloud solutions market and see how the vendors stack up against 

each other, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of top private cloud vendors. Forrester 

reached out to 27 private cloud vendors for qualifying information to identify today’s most popular 

and most widely used private cloud solutions. After assessing qualifier responses, Forrester then 

selected 10 private IaaS cloud vendors and evaluated them on 61 criteria that break down into three 

high-level categories.

After examining past research, user need assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, we 

developed a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria. We evaluated vendors against 61 criteria, 

which we grouped into three high-level buckets:

Current offering. Each vendor’s position on the vertical axis of the Forrester Wave graphic 

indicates the strength of its current product offering. The key current offering criteria are cloud 

management and self-service access, service management and creation, automation capabilities, 

heterogeneity, contract terms and support, and cost. Combined, these criteria provide a 

detailed look at the current usability, customization options, enablement for more complex 

configurations, speed, certifications, out-of-the box security features, and consumability.