Executive Summary

Cloud Computing Platforms

Cloud computing has emerged as a fundamental technology driving the digital transformation of enterprises, irrespective of their size or maturity level. It provides a robust and scalable infrastructure that supports the dynamic needs of modern businesses, enabling them to stay competitive in a digital world.

Three ways that cloud computing is essential to the ongoing operations, growth and innovation of an enterprise organization are operational efficiency, speed to market, and business continuity and resilience. Cloud computing offers on-demand access to a range of resources, including computing power, storage and networking capabilities. This eliminates the need for up-front capital investment in hardware for on-premises data centers and reduces the burden of maintenance and upgrades. Enterprises can scale their operations up or down based on demand, leading to significant cost savings and improved operational efficiency. With cloud platforms, enterprises can rapidly prototype, test and deploy new applications and systems. This accelerates the innovation process and reduces the time to market for new products and services. The cloud also supports advanced technologies like AI, machine learning and analytics, enabling businesses to derive insights and innovate faster. Cloud computing enhances business continuity and resilience. Data stored in the cloud is typically replicated across multiple servers in different locations, ensuring it is protected against hardware failures, natural disasters or other forms of disruption. Cloud providers also offer sophisticated security features to protect against cyber threats.

Cloud computing is not just a technology, but a strategic enabler that underpins the digital capabilities of the enterprise. As the market evolves, multinational, regional and sovereign cloud providers will continue to play a critical role in shaping the enterprise software technology landscape.

Ventana Research defines Cloud Platforms as a software service for organizations to access virtualized IT resources via the internet on a pay-per-use basis. These resources include servers, data processing power, data storage, networking infrastructure, virtualization capabilities and more. Cloud platforms are an enterprise alternative to operating on-premises data centers and compute environments with an environment of networking and servers.

Cloud platforms can be segmented into five main types: Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Multi-cloud and Sovereign Cloud. Each of these segments addresses unique needs of enterprise organizations and has gained prominence due to specific factors:

• Public Cloud: Public cloud services are provided by third-party providers over the internet and are available to anyone who wishes to use or purchase them. They offer scalability and elasticity unmatched by private or on-premises infrastructure, along with pricing models that convert capital expenses to operational expenses. The rise of SaaS applications and the shift towards digital business models have driven the adoption of public cloud. We believe that by 2027, over three-quarters of enterprises will operate across multiple public cloud computing environments, necessitating the requirement for a unified data platform to virtualize access for business continuity.
• Private Cloud: Private cloud refers to cloud computing resources used exclusively by a single business or organization. They provide a similar level of scalability and self-service as public clouds but within the confines of a company’s firewall, offering greater control over data, workloads and security. The need for businesses to have more control and security over their data has led to the prominence of private clouds.
• Hybrid Cloud: Hybrid cloud is an approach that combines a private cloud with one or more public cloud services, with proprietary software enabling communication between each distinct service. This model offers businesses greater flexibility by moving workloads between cloud environments as needs and costs fluctuate. The desire for flexibility and the need to leverage the benefits of both private and public cloud have brought hybrid cloud to the forefront of enterprise cloud strategies.
• Multi-cloud: Multi-cloud is the use of multiple cloud computing and storage services in a single network architecture. This refers to the distribution of cloud assets, software, applications and more across several cloud environments. With a multi-cloud strategy, enterprises can leverage the cloud environment that best meets the needs of a specific workload. The need for avoiding cloud service provider lock-in and optimizing each workload with the best platform has led to the rise of multi-cloud strategies.
• Sovereign Cloud: Sovereign cloud refers to a cloud infrastructure that is operated within the borders of a specific country and is compliant with its data sovereignty laws. It is often used by government agencies or industries with strict regulatory requirements. The increasing importance of data sovereignty and privacy concerns in many countries has led to the emergence of sovereign clouds.

Each of these cloud segments has developed to address specific enterprise needs and concerns, such as cost efficiency, scalability, control, flexibility and regulatory compliance. As enterprises continue to change and grow, these cloud approaches will continue to play a crucial role in their journey.

Cloud platforms continue to evolve, and the past year is no exception. The benefits of using a cloud service provider (CSP) over building on-premises servers include low capital outlay, faster time-to-market, agility and optimal cloud delivery models from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). While on-premises servers will not go away entirely, they must continue to compete effectively with cloud computing as an alternative for many applications and services.

Cloud platforms are worth investing in because they serve as the backbone of modern IT infrastructure, enabling organizations to leverage a wide range of services from computing power and storage to AI and machine learning. By migrating to the cloud, businesses can streamline operations, reduce costs and accelerate innovation. To meet the efficiency and innovation challenge, enterprises are expected to utilize multiple clouds. Investing time, people resources and financial resources in cloud platforms is a strategic move for enterprises aiming for digital transformation and competitive advantage.

When an enterprise CIO or IT leader is considering a cloud platform, the choice between public, private, hybrid, multi-cloud or sovereign cloud should be driven by the organization’s specific objectives, goals and desired outcomes.

Public Cloud: If the enterprise’s goal is to reduce IT infrastructure costs, increase scalability and improve operational efficiency, then a public cloud could be a suitable choice. It is also beneficial for businesses that need to quickly deploy and scale applications.

Private Cloud: If the organization prioritizes data security, regulatory compliance and customization, a private cloud could be the best fit. It is particularly useful for businesses in highly regulated industries or those that handle sensitive customer data.

Hybrid Cloud: If the organization seeks to balance the flexibility and scalability of public cloud with the security and control of a private cloud, a hybrid cloud could be the ideal approach. It is suitable for businesses that have a mix of sensitive and non-sensitive workloads.

Multi-cloud: If the organization aims to avoid software provider lock-in, optimize workload performance and increase resilience, a multi-cloud approach could be beneficial. It is advantageous for businesses that use a variety of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions.

Sovereign Cloud: If the organization operates in a country with strict data sovereignty laws or is a government entity, a sovereign cloud could be the right choice. It is designed to meet specific regulatory requirements and protect national data sovereignty.

The choice of cloud platform should align with the enterprise’s strategic objectives and operational needs. It is also important to consider factors such as cost, resource availability, technical expertise and the potential need for digital transformation. A well-chosen cloud strategy can drive innovation, enhance customer experiences and provide a competitive edge in the digital marketplace.

AI applications, particularly GenAI applications, have significantly transformed the Cloud Platforms landscape. GenAI applications require extensive computational resources, and cloud computing platforms provide the scalability enterprises need to allocate resources dynamically based on the needs of various GenAI workloads. This transformation has augmented the cloud computing market as the optimal choice for creating foundation models and deploying GenAI-powered applications.

Each cloud platform segment also has advantages for GenAI workloads. Public cloud providers are investing heavily in AI and GenAI technologies, making them a good fit for enterprises looking to leverage these technologies. For enterprises with specific regulatory and compliance requirements, private clouds can offer a controlled environment to run GenAI workloads. Hybrid clouds offer flexibility, allowing enterprises to run GenAI workloads in the most suitable environment based on specific needs. A multi-cloud strategy can help avoid software provider lock-in and optimize each workload with the best platform. Sovereign clouds can meet the evolving and unique requirements of sovereign operations no matter the region they operate in. As GenAI continues to evolve, we can expect to see more AI workload-specific cloud platforms in the future. The rapid advancement of LLMs and foundation models is driving the continual evolution of AI and GenAI capabilities and enterprise use cases. Specialty cloud providers will become an important consideration for many enterprise cloud architectures. The emergence of domain-specific models, which can be compute-efficient, more compact and reduce the risks of general-purpose model hallucinations, further suggests a future where cloud platforms may become increasingly specialized.

Our Cloud Platforms Buyers Guide is designed to provide a holistic view of a software provider’s ability to serve a variety of cloud workloads with a set of cloud platform products. As such the Cloud Platforms Buyers Guide includes the full breadth of deployment models, services and functionality. Technology vendors that provide public cloud, private cloud or hybrid cloud capabilities are represented in separate Buyers Guide research reports.

Ventana Research believes a methodical approach is essential to maximize competitiveness. To improve the performance of your enterprise’s people, process, information, and technology components, it is critical to select the right software provider and product.

This Cloud Platforms Buyers Guide evaluates products based on services, deployment model and functionality. Service types include IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. The five deployment models for cloud platforms were previously referenced and include public, private, hybrid, multi-cloud and sovereign cloud. Functionality evaluated for cloud platforms includes storage, compute, database, networking, serverless computing, and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). To be included in this Buyers Guide, products must include multiple functions, one or more services, and at least one deployment model.

This Buyers Guide report evaluates the following software providers that offer products address key elements of cloud platforms to support a combination of public, private and hybrid cloud workloads: Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Google, IBM, Leaseweb, Microsoft and Oracle.

Buyers Guide Overview

For over two decades, Ventana Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise.

This Ventana Research Buyers Guide: Cloud Computing Platforms is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for cloud computing platform software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment.

In this Buyers Guide, Ventana Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the Ventana Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for cloud computing platforms to an enterprise’s requirements.

The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of cloud computing platform technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise.

Ventana Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of cloud computing platform software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating cloud computing platforms systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology.

How To Use This Buyers Guide

Evaluating Software Providers: The Process

We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes.

1. Define the business case and goals.
   Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. 
2. Specify the business needs.
   Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
3. Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
   Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. 
4. Outline the project’s critical path.
   What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. 
5. Ascertain the technology approach.
   Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. 
6. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria.
   Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. 
7. Evaluate and select the technology properly.
   Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products.
8. Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
   Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources.

The Findings

All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software.

Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs.

Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories

The research finds Microsoft atop the list, followed by AWS and Google. Companies that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. AWS, IBM and Oracle have done so in five categories; Microsoft in four and Google in two categories.

The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.

The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance.

Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: AWS, Microsoft and Oracle.

Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The provider rated Innovative is: Google.

Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The provider rated Assurance is: IBM.

Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The providers rated Merit are: Alibaba Cloud and Leaseweb.

We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle cloud computing platforms, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs.

We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products.

Product Experience

The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s life cycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust.

The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (10%), Capability (30%), Reliability (15%), Adaptability (10%) and Manageability (15%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. Oracle, AWS and Google and Oracle were designated Product Experience Leaders. While not a Leader, Microsoft was also found to meet a broad range of enterprise product experience requirements.

Many enterprises will only evaluate capabilities for workers in IT or administration, but the research identified the criticality of Usability (10% weighting) across a broader set of usage personas that should participate in cloud computing platforms.

Customer Experience

The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire life cycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey.

The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research.

The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are Microsoft, Oracle, AWS and IBM. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs.

Few software providers we evaluated did not have sufficient information available through their website and presentations. While many have customer case studies to promote success, some lack depth in articulating their commitment to customer experience and an enterprise’s cloud computing platforms journey. As the commitment to a software provider is a continuous investment, the importance of supporting customer experience in a holistic evaluation should be included and not underestimated.

Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion

For inclusion in the Ventana Research Cloud Computing Platforms Buyers Guide for 2024, a provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $100 million in annual or projected revenue, more than 50 employees, sell products and provide support on at least two continents (or one if a sovereign, industry, or community provider), and have 200 or more customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 18 months. The cloud platform provider must provide a product that offers a deployment model of IaaS, PaaS, and/or SaaS, and a cloud computing type of Public, Private, and Hybrid, while optionally providing services for Multi-cloud, and/or Sovereign/Industry/Community Cloud.

The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.

All software providers that offer relevant cloud computing platform products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.

Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.

Products Evaluated

Providers of Promise

We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide.

Baidu Cloud, China Unicom, Hetzner, Kingsoft Cloud and KT Cloud offer a cloud computing platform that should be considered for specific geographic markets and we include as “Providers of Promise.”