Tracy Woo

This week, we published “The Forrester Wave™: Hybrid Cloud Management, Q4 2020” evaluation to help infrastructure and operations professionals understand the nine most relevant vendors in this space. This is a refresh from our previous evaluation in 2018. You’ll find there’s a number of familiar faces: BMC Software, Flexera (acquired RightScale), Micro Focus, and VMware. […]

Last week, AMD entered into agreement to acquire chip manufacturer Xilinx through a $35 billion all-stock transaction. This is the latest gargantuan M&A deal in the semiconductor market to focus on new opportunities in processing, after the NVIDIA-Arm announcement. The AMD-Xilinx partnership is meant to broaden AMD’s product portfolio, which focuses on high-performance CPUs and […]

This week I published my first Forrester Wave™: “The Forrester Wave: Cloud Cost Management And Optimization, Q4 2020“! This report is an update of the 2018 report. In 2020, the pandemic has spurred increased momentum in this space as companies look to slim down technology spending and repurpose this spend to power their adaptation. We […]

There’s been a ton of buzz and activity around my first report, “Mind The Cloud Skills Gap.” As such, when Shell presented at the IBM Think Digital event earlier this year about reskilling its staff, I was very keen to attend. The key takeaways from this session were: Shell Chief Data and Analytics Officer Frans […]

The biggest announcement from Red Hat’s Summit virtual event was Red Hat Marketplace, operated by IBM. Building on its existing container orchestration software, OpenShift, Red Hat has created a central software purchasing location for automated deployment to any cloud. Red Hat is positioning its Marketplace as the solution to critical pain points from development, security, […]

Cost management is a topic that consistently comes up in inquiry, regardless of whether the original question was about cost management or about other aspects of cloud strategy. Up until recently, cost management was exclusively served by third-party software offerings. Over the past two years, however, native cloud providers have started to invest in native […]

Over the past two years, the major native cloud players have launched cloud management product teams focused on improving the visibility, billing, and optimization capabilities available natively. Google has also joined this effort. The company provides customers with cost and billing support via onboarding checklists, how-to guides, billing support specialists, and providing billing account, catalog, […]

A unique public/private consortium organized by IBM and the Department of Energy is bringing high-performance computing to the COVID-19 fight. Analyst Tracy Woo provides details.

Last week I published “Mind The Cloud Skills Gap.” I didn’t end that declaration with an exclamation mark, but really, that’s what I feel: excitement! Why? 1) It’s my first Forrester report and 2) The report covers a topic that many clients are asking about: What do we do when we want to build a […]

Last November, Amazon Web Services launched AWS Savings Plans for EC2, Fargate, and Lambda. Unlike what the name may imply, Savings Plans doesn’t mean dollar accrual; rather, it’s a discount plan, where purchasing in bulk leads to cost savings. To participate, the program requires customers to commit to spending a specific dollar amount per hour […]

Last October, Microsoft won the $10 billion U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract. The 10-year agreement is part of a larger Pentagon initiative to modernize and unify its IT infrastructure, most of which still exists on technology from the 1980s and 1990s. The Microsoft decision came as a massive shock […]

I started last month as the newest member of Forrester’s infrastructure and operations (I&O) team. Lauren Nelson recently moved from analyst to research diretor on the I&O team, and I will be taking over her cloud management coverage. I’ve been in high tech for almost my entire life; in fact, I’m a Silicon Valley baby. […]