IBM Ranks High Among Public Clouds for Developers: Study

Forrester Research has ranked IBM among the leaders in the public cloud space, particularly when it comes to empowering enterprise developers with the tools they need to build applications.

The market research firm cited IBM as a “strong performer” in its latest Forrester Wave report, which evaluated global public cloud platforms for enterprise developers. Forrester gave IBM the highest possible score for its private and hybrid cloud strategy as well as the top ranking for IBM’s infrastructure services.

“IBM gives enterprises the fastest path to real business value in the cloud,” said Bill Karpovich, general manager of the IBM Cloud Platform, in a statement. “We believe being recognized as a strong performer in Forrester’s latest Wave report reinforces what we hear from our clients every day—that cloud is not ‘one size fits all.’ Enterprises require choice and expertise to evolve their diverse application portfolios, and IBM Cloud was designed to deliver on those core tenets.”

Moreover, in the report, Forrester lauded IBM’s deep portfolio of application and development services in addition to Big Blue’s infrastructure offerings, which include bare metal and virtual servers, storage, security services and networking.

The Forrester study, “The Forrester Wave: Global Public Cloud Platforms For Enterprise Developers, Q3 2016,” used 34 evaluation criteria to evaluate different cloud platforms.

Among IBM’s strengths, Forrester cited the company’s “platform configuration options, app migration services, cognitive analytics services, security and compliance certifications, complex networking support, growing partner roster and native DevOps tools.” The report also made note of IBM’s “enterprise-first, hybrid approach” to the cloud.

The Forrester report is a good reminder that developers come in all shapes and sizes, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

“Other cloud players have prospered by appealing to specific developers’ needs, like AWS making it cheap and simple to purchase cloud instances for dev/test processes,” he said. “But IBM has taken a far different approach by focusing on the discrete needs of enterprise organizations. Developers in those companies typically focus more intently on security and compliance requirements than do many other developers, and tend to create more complex applications than smaller companies.”

Earlier this year, two independent reports came out of Forrester Research and Synergy Research naming IBM a leader in hybrid cloud management solutions.

These reports further underscored the momentum IBM has witnessed among its customers that are increasingly turning to IBM for help connecting cloud services and applications to core systems that may always remain on-premises due to a variety of factors such as regulatory compliance, control, cost and others.

Moreover, leading brands including Marriott Enterprises, Coca Cola Amatil, Shop Direct and the U.S. Army are embracing IBM’s cloud technology and tapping into the company’s expertise in cloud services, storage and analytics to deliver services to their customers.

IBM said Forrester Research named it a leader in second-quarter Wave report on hybrid cloud management solutions. Forrester analyzed and scored numerous hybrid cloud management solutions and identified IBM as both a “leader” and a “significant software provider”.

The 32-evaluation criteria used in the report are designed to help infrastructure and operations professionals select the right partner for their hybrid cloud management needs, which includes offering developers a rich library of app and infrastructure templates, APIs, and a choice of multiple public and private clouds.

The report went on to say that some of the leaders such as IBM “offer deep and broad support for prebuilt application and infrastructure templates, powerful provisioning and configuration management, role-based controls, and rich cost, performance, and capacity management features.”