Gartner Names Four ‘Cool Vendors’ In EU Cloud Computing Market

The Information technology research and advisory firm Gartner has released the latest iterations of its yearly report, Cool Vendors in the European Cloud Computing Market. The report is designed to evaluate interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services within the European cloud computing industry.

The six-page report, priced at $495 USD, names four ‘cool vendors’— those Gartner says are overcoming Europe’s “challenging environment” for cloud computing with innovative approaches— to help CIOs and IT decision makers consider new vendors and cloud technologies.

Development of the EU’s cloud computing market has been fragmented due to a lack of continent-wide cohesion in legislation, but now, as the EU takes steps to build a cloud computing strategy for a digital single market, European vendors are finally seeing an opportunity to truly compete with American cloud computing giants such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and Microsoft Azure.

Despite the challenges of slow adoption and uneven regulation, Gartner says that cloud computing in the European market “continues to be a wide and fast-growing area that can offer many paths to success.” According to the report, Gartner research statistics in the last year are beginning to show an increase in cloud inquiries from European countries, though those numbers show regional variation within Europe.

Gartner analysts recommend that companies across the world look beyond North America for vendors in cloud computing— especially if they are located outside of North America, and are encountering challenges related to data residency and compliance.

Gartner named the following four vendors as ‘cool vendors’ in the European cloud computing market:

Basefarm: Basefarm is an Oslo, Norway, based provider of cloud-enabled managed hosting solutions. Basefarm has differentiated itself from traditional hosting services providers by offering an industrialized approach. By forgoing the traditional, highly customizable approach to managed hosting, Basefarm is able to offer standardized services that allow customers to “rapidly provision” infrastructure and application management services. That, Gartner says, makes Basefarm a ‘cool vendor.’

essensys: Essensys is a London, UK, based provider of automatically provisioning IT and digital services. Gartner’s analysts are particularly fond of essensys’s self-servicing tool, JEFF, which displays services available to the end user, and integrates with IBM Bluefin to provision them. JEFF can also monitor service level agreements (SLAs) and provider billing information.

Business Centric Services Group (BCSG): BCSG is a London, UK, based provider of cloud brokerage and aggregation services. BCSG specializes in providing large clients (with a focus on the financial services industry) “select and deliver” the right collection of cloud services to small and midsized business (SMB) clients. BCSG clients select cloud services from a BCSG catalog of applications, and their selections are then combined in the BCSG platform and delivered as a custom-branded offering, which allows BCSG clients to present the platform as their own.

Greenclouds: An outlier in the ‘cool vendors’ report, Greenclouds is a Rotterdam, Netherlands, based startup focused on addressing the very real need of managing multi-cloud workloads for a large, international enterprise operations.

To address this issue, Greenclouds provides clients with toolkits for private and public clouds, and for various networking providers. Greenclouds’ toolkits (wrappers) can offer access individual functionalities across various platforms, and allows clients to seamlessly manage their multi-cloud solutions.

Gartner reports are frequently licensed by featured vendors, who use them as marketing materials. We obtained our copy from BCSG.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.