This week Gartner released an interesting research titled Evaluation Criteria for Cloud Management Platforms.
The document, published from Gartner for Technical Professionals (GTP), is an assessment framework intended for that kind of enterprises that need a scorecard to autonomously assess or compare one or more products, develop a coherent RFI (Request for Information) or drive a POC (Proof of Concept).
Judging from the few public informations, these criteria could be used to evaluate products like:
- BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management
- CA Automation Suite for Clouds
- Cisco Intelligent Automation for Clouds
- HP Cloud Service Automation
- IBM SmartCloud Provisioning
- Microsoft System Center
- Red Hat CloudForms
- Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control
- VMware vCloud Director (or the bundle called Cloud Infrastructure Suite)
The document describes a list of characteristics that a Cloud Management Platform must have to satisfy an Enterprise customer, these are classified as Required, Preferred or Optional.
This list is the result of Gartner’s interaction with its customers and several vendors of this market segment.
The author of this research is Alessandro Perilli, founder of this website, he left Virtualization.info 19 months ago to become Research Director in GTP division at Gartner.