ISG to Conduct Study on Private and Hybrid Cloud Providers

Information Services Group (ISG) has launched a research study examining providers of private and hybrid cloud services targeted to enterprise clients.

The study results will be published in a comprehensive ISG Provider Lens report, called Next-Gen Private/Hybrid Cloud – Data Center Solutions & Services, scheduled to be released in June. The report will cover a range of private and hybrid cloud services hosted in data centers.

Enterprise buyers will be able to use information from the report to evaluate their current vendor relationships, potential new engagements and available offerings, while ISG advisors use the information to recommend providers to the firm’s buy-side clients.

The new report will look at ways private and hybrid cloud providers are helping enterprise clients achieve their business goals, said Jan Erik Aase, partner and global leader, ISG Provider Lens Research. “Private and hybrid cloud providers are an important piece of many enterprises’ IT infrastructure,” he said. “These providers free up enterprises resources to focus on the core business, while offering secure and reliable cloud services.”

ISG has distributed surveys to more than 400 private and hybrid cloud providers. Working in collaboration with ISG’s global advisors, the research team will produce five quadrants representing the services the typical enterprise client is buying in the private and hybrid cloud space, based on ISG’s experience working with its clients. The five quadrants that will be covered are:

• Managed Services, assessing a provider’s ability to offer ongoing management services for private and hybrid clouds as well as traditional data center infrastructures and platforms that comprise physical and virtual servers, middleware, storage, databases and networking components. The infrastructure may reside at a client’s data center or the service provider’s facilities or be colocated in a third-party facility.
• Managed Hosting, covering providers that offer standalone enterprise-grade hosting solutions, using their own or third-party facilities and infrastructure. The providers assessed here are responsible for the day-to-day management and maintenance of data center components such as servers, storage, operating systems, and connectivity to the external network.
• Colocation Services, looking at providers that offer standardized data center operations as colocation services for midmarket and large enterprise clients as well as public sector organizations. These companies offer community access points for various hosting providers, system houses, carriers or telecommunication providers and end users. Enterprise clients that opt for colocation services expect a standardized and sophisticated data center setup, many carrier options, low latency and high bandwidth at affordable prices.
• Hyperconverged Systems (Software Vendors), assessing vendors that offer hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) with preconfigured software and blueprints, designed to upscale or downscale server and storage clusters. HCI can centrally manage a scalable enterprise cloud, on-premises infrastructure and private clouds built on public cloud virtual machines.
• Hybrid Cloud Management Platforms, examining vendors of software to build and operate infrastructures that offer a robust integrated management platform for on-premises, public, private and hybrid clouds. This platform provides consistency across cloud environments and enables enterprises to achieve cost-effective, automated and standardized application deployments, across multi-cloud environments with robust container capabilities.

The report will cover the hyperconverged systems and hybrid cloud management platform markets on a global basis and the managed services, managed hosting and colocation services markets in the U.S., the U.S. Public Sector, Brazil, Germany, the Nordics, Switzerland, the U.K., Australia, the Benelux countries, France, and Malaysia/Singapore. ISG analysts Shashank Rajmane, Pedro L. Bicudo Maschio, Ulrich Meister, Wolfgang Heinhaus, Ian Puddy, Rohan Thomas, Angus Macaskill, Bruce Guptill and Richard Marshall will serve as authors of the report.

An archetype report will also be published as part of this study. This report, unique to ISG, is the study of typical buyer types of private and hybrid cloud services as observed by ISG advisors.

A list of identified providers and vendors and further details on the study are available in this digital brochure. A separate brochure for the U.S. Public Sector is also available.