[Network World] It’s a hybrid cloud world, and we’re all just living in it

Hybrid is the dominant cloud model, and it requires new management tools from a new crop of vendors, Forrester sayshybrid cloud thinkstock

As organizations increase their use of cloud services, Forrester principal analyst Dave Bartoletti says they’re coming to this realization: No one platform can provide everything developers and IT operations professionals need.

According to a poll of global technology users, nearly two-thirds said they’re using more than one public and/or private cloud at the same time. As has been predicted for years, hybrid cloud has become a dominant deployment methodology. Organizations are combining public cloud resources with private cloud infrastructure, or multiple public clouds, or multiple private clouds. When they do so, an overlay management software for controlling all those assets can be very helpful, Bartoletti says.

For the first time Forrester has produced a Wave report examining the leading vendors in this hybrid cloud management market, and the crop of providers leading the pack could come as a surprise.

Bartoletti breaks the market down into two major categories. There’s a relatively new collection of vendors selling agnostic management platforms. Tools from RightScale, CliQr, Dell and Scalr do not have affinity to any one cloud vendor, so they can manage many different clouds. The second category includes pre-existing software from classic management vendors like VMware, Red Hat and IBM. These vendors have extended their virtualization management software to now include cloud management.

Perhaps most surprising about this list is that vendors like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft (Azure) and Google (Cloud Platform) – who dominate the IaaS public cloud market, aren’t atop this list of cloud management tool providers. After all, why would they want to sell customers management software for competitors’ clouds?

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