Table of Contents
- Summary
- Market Categories and Deployment Types
- Key Criteria Comparison
- GigaOm Radar
- Vendor Insights
- Analyst’s Take
- Methodology
- About Matt Jallo
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
As we learned in the associated GigaOm report, “Key Criteria for Evaluating Cloud Resource Optimization Solutions,” cloud resources that are not optimized prove costly. The most valuable cloud resource management solutions provide effective and reliable resource configuration recommendations, integrate into deployment pipelines, and enhance management processes.
Furthermore, as cloud usage continues to outpace the rate at which IT operational analysts can be hired, automated optimization of these resources directly impacts the bottom-line of the cloud bill and the effectiveness of existing IT staff (who are freed up to work on higher-value business objectives). Taking an hour to determine whether a machine would benefit from less or more vCPU may seem hardly worth the time and effort but may reveal an imbalance that can generate significant excess spend or risk if neglected at scale.
As business leaders evaluate cloud resource optimization solutions, it’s important to keep the following in mind:
- Cloud resource optimization is closely aligned with the financial operations (FinOps) and cloud management platform (CMP) tooling categories, and solutions may lean in one of those directions with a strategy of providing a single solution.
- Private cloud and public cloud resources both require oversight and optimization, and solutions tend to be stronger in one area than another. You’ll need to determine where your resource challenges exist today and what improvements you want to have made 12 to 18 months from now.
- Consider delegating resource and cost optimization to individual teams, with some limited central oversight. Individual teams are closely aligned to their application performance needs and, if motivated properly and given the right tools, will ensure a balance is reached between cost and performance.
In this report, we evaluate a number of vendors on their ability to analyze and optimize cloud resources. We’ve scored vendors against the functionality (key criteria) and non-functional requirements (evaluation metrics) necessary for successful cloud resource optimization. While the final report contains eleven vendors, we ruled out many more in the process, including several vendors with offerings focused more heavily on FinOps or CMP (which are reviewed in separate GigaOm Key Criteria and Radar reports).
How to Read this Report
This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding, consider reviewing the following reports:
Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.
GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.