Commentary on Forrester’s Q4 2020 Cloud Cost Management and Optimization Report

calendar October 28, 2019

Densify is pleased to have been included in The Forrester Wave: Cloud Cost Management And Optimization, Q4 2020 report.

We do, however, believe that the evaluation was too summarized to truly illuminate the strengths and limitations of each vendor based on the specific needs of an enterprise.

For example, if you dive into the companion scoring methodology spreadsheet, in the “Recommendations” sub category within the “Cost Optimization” category, which we regard as being one of the most important, a vendor that provides basic suggestions across all cloud providers will score a 5, whereas a vendor that provides extremely precise, automatable actions based on tunable policies, benchmarks and machine learning, but does not do this for 100% of the cloud providers, will score a 2.

The evaluation rewards breadth of coverage across all public cloud providers vs deeper detailed evaluation of elements such as analytics accuracy that might be more important to an organization or buyer that wants to action instance level optimization safely.

The Forrester guidance on this is that you can use their provided spreadsheet to modify the weightings to what is important to you.

While this is true, the scoring criteria combines many elements into each category and even though you can vary the weightings of categories, because they are combining many elements in each category you cannot isolate specific interests and generate a new score.

So, in summary, the report is useful in identifying relevant vendors in the space and the criteria you might use to evaluate them but not in the case where you need to score your specific requirements.

Densify encourages interested parties to spend time with all of the vendors in the report as part of an evaluation and to run the software in your labs to ensure a match with what might be important to you versus only seeking out those scored as leaders.