Forrester Chooses Three Cloud Winners, AWS at Top of Heap

These three, along with a bevy of others, were profiled in “The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Public Cloud Platforms,” by John R. Rymer and James Staten.

When it comes to AWS findings from research houses, the results are predictable. IDC and Gartner have both chosen AWS as the number one cloud platform.

Forrester has three winners in three different categories.

Amazon got top scores for DevOps, and was ranked high in all categories. AWS is best known for its IaaS foundational offerings — EC2 and S3 — but it has expanded rapidly with a large collection of platform and application services that meet the needs of DevOps pros and coders,” Forrester said. “The capabilities of AWS’ application services, coupled with its mature infrastructure services, gave it high current offering and strategy scores across all but the rapid dev segment, where its degree of abstraction does not rise to the needs of this user.”

Out of four categories, AWS swept three, also winning Application Development and Delivery, Cloud Platform for coders, and of course DevOps.

Microsoft didn’t so badly with its fast growing Azure service. “Windows Azure is maturing rapidly, and Microsoft has both simplified the developer experience and added application services (with more coming) that appeal to all three development types. Its interfaces give rapid devs and coders easy deployment while it exposes virtual machine control and configuration for DevOps pros,” Forrester said. “Microsoft’s tooling for rapid devs, called WebMatrix, is

very limited compared to other platforms, but Windows Azure’s other strengths outweigh that weakness.6 While its IaaS controls were limited in its November 2012 release, its full IaaS offering is now generally available.”

Meanwhile Saleforce.com, mostly known for CRM, has far more to offer. “The Salesforce Platform comprises two distinct public cloud platforms: Force.com and Heroku. We evaluated The Salesforce Platform as a single entity, but our analysis notes the features of its component parts. The combined features of both platforms earned high Current Offering scores,” Forrester said. “Force.com targets rapid devs and some coders, but Force.com supports only its own

Apex language (to supplement Force.com, Force.com Sites supports a broader language set for

creating web applications. Heroku targets coders working in primarily Ruby and Java, while

partners provide support for other languages.”

Google Still Way Behind

As in a recent report by IDC, Google is still a low level player in cloud services. Ironically Google App Engine is known as one of the first PaaS services, but simply hasn’t kept pace. “Google App Engine was one of the first PaaS products for coders, but has been surpassed by more aggressive competitors. The more highly rated competitors all have one thing in common: a focused platform strategy,” Forrester said. “Google is still working on unifying its various cloud platforms and APIs — and making that unified platform relevant to both enterprises and consumer-oriented web businesses. Google has a new team managing its cloud platforms now, and we expect good results from its efforts during the next year. Google has a good foundation: Forrester estimates that Google has between 10,000 and 99,999 total customers for its Google App Engine, with between 100 and 999 of those being enterprise customers.

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