Licensed for Distribution
Published 8 April 2021 - ID G00737166
By Dennis Smith, Padraig Byrne, Josh Chessman
The cloud management tooling market is rapidly evolving. This means expanded options for I&O leaders with enterprise-level requirements for unified management, including automation, governance, life cycle management and brokering across multi-cloud environments.
Overview
Key Findings
Enterprises are facing increased pressure to move beyond a single cloud provider to enable better workload matching, improved redundancy and increased agility.
The main use case for governance is shifting around both cost management and security. Enterprises are using governance to ensure that they do not overspend or leave themselves vulnerable to security breaches. Improper governance can lead to dissatisfaction with cloud migrations.
Upper software stack activity, beyond just infrastructure as a service (IaaS), is causing a convergence of traditional cloud management tooling and newer container management offerings.
Recommendations
I&O leaders focused on infrastructure, operations and cloud management must:
Accelerate cloud success by focusing on the enterprise’s unique requirements and characteristics when choosing cloud management tooling. Do not make assumptions based on perceived industry trends.
Define governance based on your specific enterprise requirements by establishing the rules, controls, policies and resolutions needed to implement your cloud strategy.
Develop a successful tooling strategy by partnering with your application development community to determine how to enable speed and agility for application developers while ensuring safety and soundness for I&O.
Market Definition
Cloud management tools and platforms enable organizations to manage multi-cloud (i.e., on-premises, public cloud and edge) services and resources. This includes providing governance, life cycle management, brokering and automation for managed cloud infrastructure resources across multiple functional areas. The tooling can be procured and operated by central organizations (for example, I&O, cloud center of excellence [COE], platform engineering/operations) or within specific lines of business and can be deployed as an on-premises application or as a SaaS product.
Market Description
The cloud management tooling market is worth more than $1.2 billion, with an estimated 20% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2023.1 The market is made up of the following subsegments:
Cloud management platforms. Vendors that offer bundled multifunctional tools. Many of these vendors are beginning to “thin out” their initial product offerings and concentrate on more focused areas (for example, asset management or provisioning).
Third-party point tools. Vendors that are focused on a narrowly defined set of functional areas, often related to a single product or function. Many of these vendors are now focusing and branding their tools as governance tools, the most in-demand current use case. There are associated tooling vendors in areas not specifically cloud related (for example, ITSM, infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring [APM] and backup) that can also provide solutions to address cloud management.
Cloud providers. Hyperscale cloud providers (for example, AWS, Microsoft, Google) are starting to enhance their public-facing tooling to make it more appealing to enterprises. This effort will lead to major market disruptions over the next few years as organizations migrate away from third-party solutions and toward tools provided by the incumbent cloud providers.
Managed service providers (MSPs). MSP vendors (for example, Accenture, Wipro, Deloitte) offer their tooling to the enterprise either as an extension of other services or as a stand-alone product. Often, the product is a third-party offering (for example, Jamcracker that caters specifically to this market).
The market is centered around the specific cloud management function areas shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. The Areas of Cloud Management
Market Direction
The cloud management platform and tooling market is in a continual state of evolution. Recent developments include:
Hyperscale cloud providers are aggressively entering the market.
The emergence of mini-suites and/or specialized tooling around cost management/optimization, security and compliance (see Market Guide for Cloud Workload Protection Platforms), and infrastructure orchestration (see Market Guide for Infrastructure Automation Tools).
Artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) is becoming a core and foundational part of vendor tool offerings to meet the scale and dynamics posed by current enterprise requirements.
The overlap of traditional cloud management tooling and container management software is increasing.
Hybrid activity is extending to the near and far edge.
More vendor dynamics (for example, iQuate and HyperGrid merging to form CloudSphere, with a focus on providing governance centered on application discovery).
SaaS management capabilities are being incorporated with IaaS/platform as a service (PaaS) capabilities to enable enterprises to manage their entire cloud estate.
Newer players are entering the market or offering a new approach to existing use cases (for example, cloudtamer.io with its governance capabilities encompassing cloud costs and security, and Yotascale addressing cloud cost management and workload optimization for legacy and more advanced cloud architectures).
Market Analysis
When organizing to operate and support cloud management tooling, I&O leaders have a choice between centralized and decentralized models. The centralized model often will be operated and managed from within I&O, a cloud COE or a platform group. The decentralized model is more likely to be managed from within a line of business (LOB).
I&O leaders choosing a centralized model must be aware of the organizational structure already in place and the expertise that resides within those structures. When choosing a decentralized model, confirm that sufficient knowledge and skills are available within the LOB to properly support the tooling.
For larger cloud deployments (for example, if cloud spend is increasing more than 10% year over year), a centralized model will be more efficient.
The following are the most common use cases for cloud management tools. Keep in mind that different tools may support one or more use cases:
Cloud provisioning and orchestration. Using the tool primarily to automate cloud resource provisioning/deprovisioning/modification.
Cloud service brokering. Using the tool primarily to manage the interaction between cloud consumers and providers.
Cloud governance. Using the tool primarily to enforce policies and controls to ensure compliance with best practices of cloud activity.
Cloud resource management. Using the tool primarily to manage the overall cloud estate (for example, cost tracking and cloud resource optimization).
Broad Versus Narrow Focus
Most Gartner clients choose not to deploy a broad function cloud management platform (CMP), opting instead to leverage native tooling and/or cloud management tooling that provide more limited functionality (often focused on a single use case). For some organizations, a broad function CMP may be the best option, especially if you have a large on-premises deployment (that is, a private cloud and/or cloud-inspired deployment scenarios) and are selectively moving workloads into multi-cloud environments. An appropriate broad function CMP will allow users to normalize operations across all environments, improving agility, efficiency and reliability.
The cloud computing tooling market is over a decade old. In the market’s infancy, established management software companies competed against and/or acquired niche vendors. Many vendors offered multifunction cloud management platforms that had limited success in terms of enterprise adoption. Other vendors offered more focused functionality (for example, cost management) with more success. Since then, vendors have continually added more functionality.
The desire of midsize and large vendors to enhance their overall portfolio of services and capitalize on the growth of multi-cloud has driven brisk vendor-acquisition activity over the past few years (for example, HyperGrid and iQuate merging to form CloudSphere). This activity is expected to continue.
Growing Competition
Vendors will continue to face intense competition on many fronts. Besides the intense competition among vendors offering multifunction tools (CMPs) and more single-function tools, vendors will be squeezed by MSPs and hyperscale cloud providers. The MSPs are pairing tooling capabilities with professional services to help with cloud migration and transformation projects. Some vendors will provide cloud service brokering capabilities in which they use a tool, whether off the shelf or custom, to manage IaaS, PaaS and SaaS resources. Finally, hyperscale providers are beginning to target enterprises that have selected their cloud infrastructure as the preferred option, providing specific functionality for native workloads while offering “good enough” tooling for workloads from key competitors.
Enterprises are finding that they need a management strategy that combines native (homogeneous) cloud management functionality with heterogeneous support provided by a third party. Vendors continue to move rapidly toward improved support for native capabilities, which risks reducing their value-add to aggregation. They are doing so with varying degrees of success. Vendors also are adding/enhancing other functional areas (for example, governance, IT asset management and infrastructure as code [IaC]). Many are trying to offer modular capabilities so that enterprises can choose and pay for only the functionality they need. Additionally, as more enterprises adopt container-related technology, tooling is starting to provide operational aspects for such deployments. This is causing cloud management tooling to overlap with container management software.
Most vendors are enhancing their offerings with ML and AI, mining data and feeding it into functional areas including security remediation, cost forecasting and infrastructure life cycle management.
Vendors provide a range of billing models. Most offer subscription models based on cloud consumption. Some charge based on resource elements (for example, virtual instance, container, function). They typically grant discounts for volume.
Vendors that do not successfully broaden into key functional areas, integrate their functionality and provide it in an easy-to-use and cost-effective manner will not survive.
Representative Vendors
Market Introduction
In Table 1, we list sample cloud management tooling vendors, selected based on market traction and Gartner client inquiry volume.
Table 1: Representative Vendors in Cloud Management Tooling
Vendor | Product |
Cloudability,Cloudability SaaS and Cloudability Shift | |
BMC Helix Digital Workplace, TrueSight Orchestration, TrueSight Automation for Servers, BMC Helix Operations Management, BMC Helix Discovery, BMC Helix Cloud Security, TrueSight Automation for Networks, BMC Helix Cloud Cost, BMC Helix Capacity Optimization and BMC Helix Vulnerability Management | |
CloudBolt, OneFuse and Kumolus | |
CMx | |
CloudSphere Cloud Governance Platform | |
Enterprise Cloud Governance (ECG), Management Service Provider/MSP Cloud Governance (MCG) and Enterprise Cloud Compliance (ECC) | |
Densify | |
Cloud Cost Optimization,Flexera Cloud Management Platform and Flexera One | |
Cloud Cost Optimization,Flexera Cloud Management Platform and Flexera One | |
Cloud Cost Optimization,Flexera Cloud Management Platform and Flexera One | |
Morpheus | |
Spot by NetApp | |
Calm, Beam and Flow Security Control | |
Cloud Management Platform and Terraform Automation & Collaboration Software (TACOS) | |
ITOM Optimization, ITOM Health, ITOM Visibility, Cloud Insights, Security Incident Response, and Governance, Risk and Compliance | |
Snow Commander, Productivity Optimizer, Adoption Tracker and Risk Monitor | |
Snow Commander, Productivity Optimizer, Adoption Tracker and Risk Monitor | |
Turbot | |
vRealize Automation, vRealize Orchestrator, vRealize Log Insight, vRealize Network Insight, CloudHealth, Tanzu Observability, vRealize Operations, VMware HCX, Site Recovery Manager, VMware Workspace ONE Access, CloudHealth Secure State and vRealize Automation SaltStack SecOps |
Source: Gartner (April 2021)
The vendors listed in this Market Guide do not imply an exhaustive list. This section is intended to provide more understanding of the market and its offerings.
Vendor Profiles
Apptio
Apptio, founded in 2007, is a software vendor in the IT financial management (ITFM) space. Apptio began offering public cloud cost management and optimization capabilities with its acquisitions of FittedCloud in October 2018 and of Cloudability in May 2019. Subsequent to the Cloudability acquisition, Apptio migrated the FittedCloud capabilities (rebranded Cloud Business Management) into Cloudability, making Cloudability Apptio’s sole public cloud cost management and optimization solution. Cloudability is delivered as a SaaS product.
In addition, Apptio offers Cloudability SaaS and Cloudability Shift within its cloud financial management portfolio. Cloudability SaaS employs direct API and single sign-on integrations to visualize, manage and report on SaaS financial, license and contract details. Cloudability Shift enables organizations to inventory and reconcile on-premises commitments and cloud costs to model workload migrations. Both are delivered as SaaS products that integrate directly with Cloudability and the broader Apptio portfolio.
Apptio’s cloud management functionality is primarily in the cost management and workload optimization areas, where the vendor has successfully incorporated cloud computing cost management (including Kubernetes support) into the larger IT financial management area.
Pricing is a subscription model based on cloud consumption.
BMC
BMC, founded in 1980, has a long-standing history of providing cloud management functionality going back to the announcement of Cloud Lifecycle Management (CLM) more than a decade ago. BMC has continually combined many of its existing products with specific content associated with managing cloud computing resources.
BMC’s cloud management tooling provides functionality within most of the cloud management functional areas through a wide set of products:
Provisioning and orchestration: BMC Helix Digital Workplace, TrueSight Orchestration and TrueSight Automation for Servers
Service enablement: BMC Helix Digital Workplace
Monitoring and observability: BMC Helix Operations Management
Inventory and classification: BMC Helix Discovery, BMC Helix Cloud Security, TrueSight Automation for Servers and TrueSight Automation for Networks
Cost management and resource optimization: BMC Helix Capacity Optimization and BMC Helix Cloud Cost
Cloud management, backup and disaster recovery: Helix Discovery and Helix Capacity Optimization
Security, identity and compliance: BMC Helix Cloud Security, BMC Helix Vulnerability Management, TrueSight Automation for Servers and TrueSight Automation for Networks
BMC offers perpetual licensing and reoccurring support along with subscription pricing.
CloudBolt
Founded in 2012, CloudBolt is headquartered in Rockville, Maryland. CloudBolt originally provided on-premises provisioning software for federal government agencies. The company built a strong reputation around bringing order to chaotic on-premises environments. The company has since shifted to full life cycle management of on-premises and public cloud infrastructure. CloudBolt also made key 2020 acquisitions. In June 2020, CloudBolt acquired SovLabs (the resulting offering is now called OneFuse), which provides extensive integration capabilities for orchestration and provisioning using VMware vRealize Automation, HashiCorp Terraform and other infrastructure automation tools. In August 2020, the company acquired Kumolus, a startup that provides security and cost management governance. These acquisitions have more fully rounded out CloudBolt’s offering. In November 2020, CloudBolt received $35 million in series B funding, consisting of both equity and venture debt.
CloudBolt provides a broad range of functionality for cloud management functions by combining CloudBolt, OneFuse and Kumolus to address all seven of the cloud management functional capabilities. The company is planning to move beyond its current emphasis on provisioning and orchestrating complex, heterogeneous on-premises and public cloud environments to include multi-cloud governance. CloudBolt and OneFuse can be delivered as a virtual appliance, on-premises or within a hosted cloud environment. Kumolus is delivered as a SaaS-based solution.
CloudBolt provides an annual subscription model with upfront payment.
CloudCheckr
CloudCheckr is a cloud management vendor focused on cloud cost management and cloud security. The company was founded in 2011 and has raised almost $70 million to date with the latest round in August 2019 of series B funding, primarily from private equity firm Level Equity. CloudCheckr started as a cloud security product vendor and later expanded into cost management. The company has been successful in achieving symmetry and synergies within both domains. CloudCheckr is one of the few vendors that primarily concentrates on cost management and security, two key foundational elements associated with cloud governance.
CloudCheckr provides all of its functionality in a single product, CMx. CMx spans cost tracking, optimization, resource inventory, security and compliance for public cloud platforms. The vendor has added specific capabilities to help service providers with its public cloud managed services business. CloudCheckr has also achieved traction among federal government entities. The CloudCheckr product is delivered as SaaS only.
CloudCheckr provides billing flexibility, including traditional SaaS subscriptions, metering, OEM-based pricing and royalty-based models. The most common models used are SaaS subscriptions based on capacity (a function of cloud spend managed), with term and volume-based discounts.
CloudSphere
CloudSphere was founded in 2020 through the merger of iQuate and HyperGrid, two established cloud management tooling vendors. CloudSphere offers a solution (CloudSphere Cloud Governance Platform) that provides cost management and security governance along with actionable cloud migration recommendations. All of the functionality is centered around a dynamically updated inventory.
The joint vendor has raised $15 million of venture funding to develop the solution. iQuate, founded in 2001, focused on application discovery and dependency mapping associated with cloud migration. The vendor developed a particular expertise around SAP, Oracle and complex workload cloud migrations. HyperGrid, founded in 2016, was a multifunction cloud management platform with a particular expertise around cost analysis and workload optimization. Its technology was rooted in analytics associated with benchmarking performance on instance types across the public cloud providers.
With core capabilities from iQuate and HyperGrid, CloudSphere is targeting the most popular cloud management use case, cloud governance. This ensures that it does not overspend or leave itself vulnerable from a security standpoint.
CloudSphere utilizes a subscription-based pricing model.
CoreStack
CoreStack, founded in 2016 and headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, is a venture-backed startup that has raised over $15 million in total financing including receiving an $8.5 million in series A venture capital in March 2020. CoreStack has a deep focus on AI-/ML-powered continuous and autonomous cloud governance with a high degree of automation. The company also provides benchmarking capabilities and tight integration with IT service management (for example, ServiceNow) and operational monitoring tools (for example, Zabbix).
CoreStack offers capabilities addressing most cloud management functionality areas. Capabilities are focused on the areas of governance (Enterprise Cloud Governance [ECG] and Management Service Provider/MSP Cloud Governance [MCG]) and compliance adherence (Enterprise Cloud Compliance [ECC]). CoreStack’s capabilities offer multifaceted governance (for example, for access, operations, cost management and security). CoreStack’s compliance capabilities are highly automated and offer scan once and get posture for multiple compliance standards. Additionally, CoreStack’s compliance capabilities include service-level posture analysis and remediation for identified violations.
CoreStack targets both enterprises and managed service providers.
CoreStack’s pricing is a flexible subscription model based on the percentage of total cloud consumption or number of resources utilized.
Densify
Densify, formed in 1999, is a privately held company based in Markham, Ontario, Canada. The company initially was called Cirba and had a major focus around VMware capacity optimization but changed its name to Densify in June 2017 coinciding with a move to SaaS delivery and public cloud and container resource optimization.
Densify is a pure-play vendor, working solely in the cost management and workload resource optimization area. Unlike some companies that started in the cost management area (that is, just informing on spend), Densify is rooted in workload optimization (that is, informing on how spend can be reduced through optimizing the use of resources, not just how they are purchased) from the start. The company, leveraging machine learning technology, addresses the cost management and resource optimization functional areas. The product optimizes efficiency while considering application requirements. Densify was one of the first to optimize container-based workload deployments. The technology is offered as SaaS and combined with advisory services of cloud experts who assist customers in extracting value from the technology.
Billing is on a subscription basis, per instance per year (where an instance could be cloud instances/containers/VMs), with volume discounts.
Flexera
Flexera is a vendor in the software asset management (SAM) area. Flexera was founded in 2008. Private equity firm Thoma Bravo was an initial majority interest holder in Flexera in 2008, sold its stake in 2011 and then bought a majority interest for the second time in December 2020. In September 2018, Flexera acquired RightScale, an early entrant in the cloud management area, to complement its SAM offering with RightScale’s CMP functionality. In 2017, RightScale began providing a cloud cost management and resource optimization product (Flexera Cloud Cost Optimization) that can be used as a stand-alone solution or integrated with other cloud management functions (Flexera Cloud Management Platform). In June 2019, Flexera acquired RISC Networks, which has expertise in Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM), including cloud migration assessment and service mapping.
The company has been integrating the IP from all three cloud management entities to provide enterprises with a common solution to manage their IT estate from a single platform (Flexera One).
Flexera concentrates on the full range of cloud management functionality but with an increasing focus on cost management, migration and governance. It does this on a platform centered around the pillars of orchestration, access control and policy. Delivery is via a SaaS model.
Flexera offers a range of billing options, with most clients leveraging a subscription model based on cloud consumption.
IBM (Red Hat)
IBM’s latest foray into multi-cloud management has addressed many of the limitations of prior IBM cloud management tooling. Capabilities of IBM’s Cloud Pak for Multi-cloud Management (CP4MCM), launched in 2019, include cost and asset management, workload protection and compliance, orchestration, and provisioning. IBM includes infrastructure automation and management of private cloud deployments through CloudForms as well as integration with Terraform and/or Ansible. It provides hybrid application management and operational capabilities like dynamic discovery and workload placement. The vendor extends application operations through integrations with OEM partners like Turbonomics.
IBM has also developed synergies between its tooling and adjacent Red Hat offerings (for example, OpenShift for container management) where the combination of CP4MCM and these offerings presents a full-stack end-to-end solution. IBM plans to leverage its Watson platform to augment the existing offering. This includes increasing the number of third-party tools/plug-ins and merging use cases and technologies with its Watson AIOps offering.
Billing is based on a managed virtual server element that allows license transfer among different capabilities.
Micro Focus
Micro Focus, founded in 1976, became a player in the cloud management tooling area after acquiring many software assets from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in 2017, including Hybrid Cloud Management. The company spent the past few years aggregating, decomposing and reengineering many of its cloud management assets. This culminated in Hybrid Cloud Management X, the company’s cloud management offering. Hybrid Cloud Management X is capable of handling complex on-premises requirements in addition to cloud management. The modular, microservice-based composable cloud management offering is focused on hybrid multi-cloud service provisioning and management, orchestration, governance, and cloud spend insights. Orchestration is rooted in long-standing IT process automation capabilities.
Hybrid Cloud Management X and other Micro Focus products address these cloud management functional areas:
Monitoring and observability: Operations Bridge
Inventory and classification: Universal Discovery
Cost management and workload optimization: Hybrid Cloud Management X
Cloud migration, backup and disaster recovery: PlateSpin Migrate and Data Protector
Security, identity and compliance: Data Center Automation, Network Automation and Identity Manager
Micro Focus could be a fit for complex on-premises environments that are selectively migrating workloads to multiple public cloud environments. Pricing is based on perpetual one- to three-year billing.
Morpheus Data
Morpheus Data, founded in 2014, was established after the productization of an internal project used at Bertram Capital to enable DevOps transformation within its private equity portfolio companies. Initial industry recognition was slow, as the company focused on engineering and beta customers. However, in the past few years, Morpheus has gained traction among enterprises and service providers seeking full-function cloud management platforms.
Morpheus Data’s key focus is on the integration of DevOps, cloud operations and, increasingly, business teams with a self-service, platform-independent solution. The vendor offers a broad cloud management solution with capabilities in all the key functional areas. It also maintains a wide range of integrations in all the major cloud providers, both public and private, as well as out-of-the-box integrations with a large number of third-party application life cycle tools. This vendor has recently doubled down in bridging the gap between I&O and app developers by providing capabilities geared toward platform teams, including Kubernetes cluster management and operationalizing cloud-native IaC.
Morpheus Data is noteworthy for the versatility of its solution, with its latest product (Morpheus v.5) having strong capabilities in most cloud management functional areas.
Morpheus Data presents a subscription-based pricing model based on workload count.
NetApp
NetApp is a long-standing enterprise storage vendor that has recently expanded into the cloud management area. In June 2020, NetApp acquired Spot.io, a startup that specializes in cloud cost management and workload optimization. Spot had amassed $52.6 million in venture funding.
NetApp’s current offering is branded Spot by NetApp, which is a portfolio of integrated products that automates and optimizes cloud infrastructure in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud to deliver SLA-backed availability and performance. Spot technology uses machine language and analytics algorithms that enable enterprises to continuously optimize compute resources, with storage optimization planned for later this year.
Spot’s capabilities matched against cloud management functionality include:
Provisioning and orchestration: Spot Elastigroup and Spot Ocean
Monitoring and observability: Spot Elastigroup, Spot Cloud Analyzer and Spot Ocean (for containerized workloads)
Inventory and classification: Spot Cloud Analyzer
Cloud management and workload optimization: Spot Cloud Analyzer, Spot Eco, Spot Elastigroup and Spot Ocean
Spot Wave, a newly announced offering, provides monitoring and observability for big data workloads running on Kubernetes.
Spot by NetApp is priced on a subscription model based on cloud consumption and customer savings.
Nutanix
Nutanix, a leader in the hyperconverged infrastructure area, entered the cloud management market with the 2016 acquisition of Calm.io and the 2018 acquisition of Minjar. These products are now called Nutanix Calm, Beam and Flow Security Central.
Calm uses blueprints for application provisioning and orchestration delivered via a self-service marketplace. It supports AWS, Azure, GCP, Nutanix Private Cloud and VMware ESXi. Beam, offered as a SaaS, provides cost management and resource optimization capabilities for AWS, Azure, GCP and Nutanix Private Cloud. Flow Security central provides security compliance, threat intelligence and security planning capabilities for AWS, Azure and Nutanix Private Cloud.
Nutanix has evolved the products from limited-function stand-alone offerings to tooling that provides a range of cloud management functions for different use cases. The company has also eliminated notable seams between the offerings. Nutanix’s offerings are mapped to the following cloud management functional areas:
Provisioning and orchestration: Calm
Service enablement: Calm and Beam
Inventory and classification: Flow Security Central
Cloud management and workload optimization: Beam
Security, identity, compliance: Flow Security Central
Nutanix is a good fit for enterprises with a large on-premises deployment (particularly Nutanix deployments) with a deliberate cloud migration strategy. Nutanix offers cloud-resource-based pricing or cloud-spend-based pricing.
Scalr
Founded in 2011, Scalr started as an open-source project in 2007. The company is based in San Francisco, California.
Scalr offers two products: its long-standing Cloud Management Platform and its recently announced TACOS, which offers state management, policy enforcement and GitOps automation that works in conjunction with HashiCorp’s Terraform. There is some overlap between Scalr’s CMP and TACOS offerings across the cloud management functional areas, but the CMP offering is geared toward traditional I&O teams and TACOS is geared toward application developers.
Scalr’s CMP, which addresses most of the cloud management functional areas, is delivered via an on-premises deployment or deployed via SaaS. The CMP is configured via a graphical user interface or may be automated via the APIs provided. The offering has strong integrations with the major public cloud providers (AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure) and on-premises via VMware integrations.
With Scalr’s primary recent focus around its Terraform Automation & Collaboration Software, it might be a good fit for enterprises looking to deploy Terraform while also needing a multifunctional CMP. Pricing is based on the number of users, workspaces and/or VMs.
ServiceNow
ServiceNow’s cloud management strategy is to incorporate cloud management capabilities with the wider set of its operational and service management offerings. This began with the acquisition of ITapp, an early player in the cloud management tooling area. These capabilities are part of ServiceNow’s IT Workflows products, which include:
ITOM Optimization (cloud provisioning and governance)
ITOM Health (AIOps and agent-based monitoring)
ITOM Visibility (discovery, service mapping and Service Graph)
Cloud Insights (cost management and workload optimization)
Security Incident Response
Governance, Risk and Compliance
ServiceNow’s overall cloud management functionality has continually improved over the past few years, particularly in the cost management area. The company plans to further increase provisioning capabilities and the number of prebuilt connectors. The offering provides support for a wide range of environments, including AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM, Oracle and VMware.
ServiceNow could be a good fit for organizations that have invested or plan to invest in the broader ServiceNow portfolio of products, as the cloud management capabilities can be easily added and incorporated into existing ServiceNow workflows.
ServiceNow prices are based on a 90-day average of resources managed.
Snow Software
Snow Software acquired Embotics in December 2019, and now has both software asset management and CMP capabilities. The key cloud management product is Snow Commander. To satisfy cloud management functional areas, the following products may also be used in conjunction with Snow Commander:
Service enablement: Productivity Optimizer
Inventory and classification: Adoption Tracker
Security, identity and compliance: Risk Monitor
Snow has continually improved its solutions’ support for containers, DevOps and expense management. This includes the ability to automatically deploy workloads to ideal cloud environments based on a dynamic, multifactor rating system. The product is delivered as an installed platform that can be configured on-premises or as a fully managed SaaS offering. The company plans to bring the product portfolios from Embotics and Snow closer together in a unified platform, with modular offerings centered on providing organizations with the technology intelligence needed to gain complete visibility into their entire technology landscape, control and optimize cost, reduce risk, and increase business agility.
The vendor has had success with enterprises and service providers that require a significant degree of management functional parity across public cloud and on-premises infrastructure resources. Snow offers subscription-based pricing.
Turbonomic
Turbonomic was incorporated in December 2008 and received initial funding in February 2009. Turbonomic is an IT management vendor focused on application resource management and optimization. The company has raised almost $250 million to date.
Turbonomic was formerly known as VMTurbo and rebranded to its current name in August 2016. VMTurbo provided software to increase the efficiency of data centers while preserving quality of service. Turbonomic extended the software’s optimization functionality to public cloud services to achieve continuous cost optimization. The vendor provides a single platform (SaaS and on-premises) that includes its legacy data center capabilities as well as new functions for public cloud and containers running on Kubernetes. Turbonomic acquired ParkMyCloud in May 2019 for its self-service cloud optimization capabilities. Turbonomic currently offers ParkMyCloud as a stand-alone product delivered as SaaS.
Turbonomic Application Resource Management addresses many of the capabilities across:
Provisioning and orchestration
Monitoring and observability (with Turbonomic Data Cloud)
Inventory and classification
Cloud migration
Turbonomic has become a part of many other vendors’ ecosystems due to its unique resource optimization technology. It is noteworthy for workload optimization and should be evaluated for complex enterprise optimization requirements.
Turbonomic offers subscription-based pricing based on VM or cloud instance during one- to three-year terms.
Turbot
Turbot is a privately held company that provides automated governance controls for PaaS, SaaS and IaaS services running on AWS, Microsoft Azure and GCP. Turbot was one of the first companies to focus solely on public cloud governance. A key distinguishing feature is that Turbot does not abstract native capabilities for cloud users; instead, Turbot applies governance in real time while allowing native cloud access. This ensures that Turbot can apply governance controls regardless of the source of the change (for example, elevated human access, automated or triggered change via APIs, CLI or Terraform).
Turbot monitors change occurring in the cloud environment (leveraging its Cloud CMDB) and compares that change to standardized or custom governance policies. If a change results in a misconfigured resource, Turbot has the ability to take remediation action (i.e., notification of issue, deletion of resource or reconfiguration of the resource).
Turbot could be a fit for enterprises deploying governance over a number of independently operating application development and/or DevOps teams, or highly regulated companies that need to move complex governance controls to the cloud.
Turbot offers a subscription pricing model based on the number of active governance controls in place.
VMware
VMware, founded in 1998, historically has provided on-premises and some public cloud management capabilities as part of its vRealize Suite. However, it started to provide significant functionality for public cloud cost management with its acquisition of CloudHealth Technologies in August 2018. Since the acquisition, the company developed synergies between CloudHealth and vRealize to provide a governance offering.
VMware has the broadest set of cloud management products in the industry available as both on-premises and SaaS offerings:
Provisioning and orchestration: vRealize Automation (includes vRealize Orchestrator, vRealize Automation SaltStack Config)
Service enablement: vRealize Automation
Monitoring and observability: vRealize Operations, vRealize Log Insight, vRealize Network Insight, CloudHealth, Tanzu Observability
Inventory and classification: vRealize Operations, vRealize Network Insight, CloudHealth
Cost management and resource optimization: CloudHealth, vRealize Operations
Cloud migration, backup and disaster recovery: vRealize Automation, vRealize Network Insight, VMware HCX, VMware Site Recovery Manager
Security, identity and compliance: VMware Workspace ONE Access, CloudHealth Secure State, vRealize Operations, vRealize Network Insight, vRealize Automation, vRealize Automation SaltStack SecOps
DevOps: vRealize Automation (includes VMware Cloud Templates, Cloud Assembly, Code Stream, vRealize Automation SaltStack Config)
Enterprises that are heavily invested in VMware infrastructure, whether deployed in the data center or on VMware-based public clouds such as VMware Cloud on AWS, should evaluate the VMware Cloud Management product set. VMware offers a variety of pricing models.
Market Recommendations
More than 100 vendors offer cloud management functionality. To map their requirements to the right product:
Navigate a wide variety of competitive pricing structures by modeling potential pricing against your future cloud deployment plans and compare against competitive offerings.
Analyze potential vendors’ architecture to ensure smooth procurement, implementation, training and ongoing operational maintenance. Some vendors have a common architecture that provides multiple functions, and some have modular offerings and charge only for functions used. Some vendors are integrating acquired products with varying degrees of success, and some provide a limited set of core capabilities and offer integration points for best-in-class products.
Budget time and resources to out-of-the-box integration, which is improving but variable across tooling solutions.
Combine third-party functionality with cloud-native tooling, choosing where a tool makes sense (for example, cost management, resource optimization, governance and security) versus where it doesn’t (for example, provisioning and orchestration, monitoring, and analytics). Ensure a CMP’s ability to abstract native services provided by cloud providers does not inhibit innovation within your organization.
Assess your need for both broad and deep functionality. The broader a tool’s set of capabilities, the higher the risk that functionality in each capability is shallow. Point solutions achieve deeper functionality due to a narrower focus.
The following are questions that Gartner frequently receives associated with the cloud management tooling and platform market.
How do I navigate the market?
Begin with a detailed analysis of your enterprise’s functional requirements with respect to cloud management. This analysis must be focused around the specific areas outlined in Figure 1.
After identifying your requirements within each of these areas, evaluate your strategic vendors, including your public cloud providers, as many will have tools within this area. Choosing tools from one of your public cloud providers can ease integration with existing tooling and may save you money.
Only after you have determined capability deltas (that is, your specific requirements versus functionality that is or can be provided by your strategic and/or public cloud vendors) should you look to the third-party market.
What characteristics should I look for in a tool?
A complete list of characteristics is beyond the scope of this research, but any tool selected should have at least the following attributes:
Exposes all the native cloud capabilities your users need.
Modular, allowing you to only use and pay for the functions you need.
A SaaS option to eliminate the need for an on-premises deployment.
AI and ML as a part of the tool.
Should I just use the native cloud tooling?
Identify your organization’s specific requirements and the functions your cloud partners provide. Begin looking at third-party options after you have exhausted the possibilities from native providers. During your evaluation process, answer the following questions:
Are you currently single or multi-cloud, and what are your plans for the future? Single cloud creates a strong use case for native tooling. Multi-cloud may make native tooling less attractive.
Do you support a large on-premises environment? Having a large on-premises environment in which you want to use the same tooling as your cloud environment(s) makes native cloud tooling more challenging.
Are you planning to migrate workloads to, from or between cloud and/or on-premises environments? A third-party tooling solution helps abstract some of the complexities and differences between environments.
Should I look to support in-house or select an MSP?
Most tools will not work “out of the box” but will require significant deployment and configuration work. An organization with strong existing MSP relationships should determine if its existing providers can assist with this process. If existing providers are not capable of assisting, the decision is essentially as if the organization had no MSP relationships.
Organizations without MSP relationships must decide if they want to manage and operate the selected tooling internally. If so, they must identify the proper employees, and/or hire and train new staff. If not, they must identify a suitable MSP partner (see Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Professional and Managed Services, Worldwide and Critical Capabilities for Public Cloud Infrastructure Professional and Managed Services, Worldwide).
What pricing model is right for me?
Vendors leverage a variety of different pricing models, including a percentage of public cloud spend and per-element pricing. I&O leaders should:
Ensure that the pricing model can be forecast easily and accurately. Otherwise, budgeting and planning is virtually impossible. Avoid vendors that are unable to provide reliable estimates and guaranteed pricing limitations.
Confirm that the vendor is not billing or including features and functions that are unnecessary. Make sure you are being billed only for what you actually use.
Evidence
(1) The Market Guide reflects a broad-based research effort including:
More than 300 interactions with Gartner clients inquiring about cloud management solutions during the past 18 months.
Many in-person discussions and other interactions with the vendors in this Market Guide.
Other data and insight gathered via publicly available means.
Note 1: Representative Vendor Selection
Representative vendors are companies that offer cloud management tooling that meets the market definition. They were selected based on market traction and Gartner client inquiry volume.
Note 2: Gartner’s Initial Market Coverage
This Market Guide provides Gartner’s initial coverage of the market and focuses on the market definition, rationale for the market and market dynamics.
Note 3: Incorporation of the Cloud Management Platform Market
The cloud management platform market, covered in the past few iterations of the Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms, has been incorporated into this Market Guide, which covers that market along with other cloud management tooling markets.
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