News

Research Firm Ranks 9 Cloud Management Platforms

• By David Ramel
• 01/10/2019

Research firm Gartner Inc. published a new report on cloud management platforms, listing Flexera (RightScale), Scalr, Embotics and Morpheus Data in the "leaders" category.

"CMPs enable organizations to manage multicloud (i.e., private and public cloud) services and resources," the report says. "This includes providing governance, life cycle management, brokering and automation for managed cloud resources across most of seven functional areas. These include provisioning and orchestration; service request management; inventory and classification; monitoring and analytics; cost management and resource optimization; cloud migration, backup and disaster recovery; and identity, security and compliance."

Performing those functions the best is Flexera, which acquired RightScale in September 2018.

"RightScale is a pioneer in the cloud management market, and has achieved industry traction with a number of named enterprise clients," said Gartner in listing the firm's strengths, which also included wide breadth of cloud management functionality, along with its history of working with a diverse set of cloud providers and support of the broadest set of providers in its product set.

The report listed only nine vendors overall, with the above-mentioned four placed in the leaders section of the firm's "magic quadrant" approach. It sees VMware (CloudHealth) and CloudBolt as "challengers," while HyperGrid is the lone entrant among "visionaries" and ServiceNow and Micro Focus occupying the "niche players" quadrant.

While only nine vendors were featured in the report (published Jan. 7), Gartner expects the space to expand. "To handle the demand for managing multicloud deployments, the number of commercially available cloud management platforms (CMPs) will more than double by 2021, to more than 30 offerings," the firm said.