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Forecast: 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms

Forecast: 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms

Forecast: 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms

For the second year in a row, enterprise technology professionals look forward to the release of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms. As the premier report in the marketplace, cloud management leaders base many of their yearly initiatives and purchasing decisions on Gartner’s advice. Featuring a proprietary research methodology, the analyst house’s annual release garners hype unparalleled in the enterprise, and on par with that of Apple’s keynote events in the consumer technology space.

This will only be the second year that cloud management platforms (CMPs) are represented through a Magic Quadrant, as Gartner released the first CMP report in 2019. As Gartner refines their evaluation criteria and market expectations, the 2020 report should represent a larger, more advanced batch of vendors.

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At Solutions Review, we share in the excitement as we near the eve of Gartner’s newest release. It’s in this spirit that our editors have compiled this list of the three things we expect to see once the report becomes available.

More vendors get Magic Quadrant representation

The 2019 Magic Quadrant for CMPs featured nine vendors: CloudBolt, Embotics, Flexera (RightScale), HyperGrid, Micro Focus, Morpheus Data, Scalr, ServiceNow, and VMware (CloudHealth). In that report, Gartner noted that they believe the number of commercial-grade CMPs will more than double by 2021, with potentially more than 30 offerings on the market. This is supported by the Gartner Peer Insights site for CMPs, which (at the time of writing this article) currently lists 26 vendors and platforms.

We naturally expect, then, that more CMPs will be represented in the 2020 Magic Quadrant. Platform9, TerraForm Enterprise, and Turbonomics are likely candidates based on their Peer Insights reviews and userbase. Gartner themselves listed 10 honorable mentions in the 2019 report, many of which failed to make the cut by not unifying their cloud management solutions into one platform. As companies condense their management capabilities, we anticipate a handful of additions to the 2020 report.

Our MSP Buyer’s Guide contains profiles on the top cloud managed service providers for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as questions you should ask vendors and yourself before buying. We also offer an MSP Vendor Map that outlines those vendors in a Venn diagram to make it easy for you to select potential providers.

More AI capabilities for CMPs

In our post regarding Gartner’s 2019 Critical Capabilities for Cloud Management Platforms report, we said that “artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities will eventually become a crucial aspect of CMPs, but probably not by the end of the year. As cloud management becomes a more mature sector, we expect the use of AI and machine learning (ML) will increase significantly.” We still believe this, and we anticipate Gartner will note more AI and ML features in their 2020 Magic Quadrant. To deal with the large amounts of data that enterprises work with on a daily basis, CMP vendors need to implement AI-driven cloud management capabilities. This will allow them to stay competitive as the cloud management market continues to grow.

A rise in niche vendors

There were two Niche Players in the 2019 CMP Magic Quadrant — Micro Focus and Service Now. Gartner stated in their report that CMP vendors “will eventually scale back and focus on specific enterprise requirements, such as inventory and classification, governance, financial management, workload optimization, and cloud migration decision support. At the same time, they will interface with best-in-class products (third-party and native-cloud) for other functions.” Thus, we expect that more vendors will be named to the Niche Players quadrant this year as companies focus on specialty cloud management capabilities.


Looking for more info on managed service providers for your cloud solutions? Our MSP Buyer’s Guide contains profiles on the top cloud managed service providers for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as questions you should ask vendors and yourself before buying. We also offer an MSP Vendor Map that outlines those vendors in a Venn diagram to make it easy for you to select potential providers.

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