Tracy Woo

Cloud is no longer simply a path to greater efficiency. Today, it's a strategy for IT modernization. Get a preview of Forrester's new report, The State Of The Cloud In The US, in this blog post.

Late Sunday evening, Bloomberg reported rumors of advanced Broadcom talks to acquire VMware, which has since been confirmed this morning. In light of Broadcom’s investment activities in the past few years, this news is unsurprising. It made a string of massively expensive enterprise software company acquisitions: Brocade Communications Systems in 2016 ($5.9 billion), CA Technologies […]

Gaia-X launched to great fanfare in 2019 as a joint initiative of the German and French governments to reclaim data sovereignty from non-European public cloud providers. Despite hefty promises, production-ready services have not been delivered to the market, with customers continuing to wait like poor Godot. While the hype around Gaia-X has fizzled out, the […]

Investing in new AI infrastructure in 2022? My colleague Mike Gualtieri and I published a new Forrester Wave™ report: The Forrester Wave™: AI Infrastructure, Q4 2021. This is a brand-new topic for Forrester Wave evaluations. Its purpose is to dig into the massive explosion of AI that is quickly transforming enterprises. We looked at the […]

Compute is getting more standardized, right? The answer is actually “yes and no.” Although standardized computing via public cloud platforms is growing, so is the list of specialized compute readily available for consumption on these same platforms. Once again, cloud is lowering the barrier to entry by providing easy and on-demand access to these highly […]

The biggest barrier to wider Kubernetes (K8s) adoption in the enterprise may not a cumbersome customer resource definition or an incomprehensible service mesh but rather a skeptical CFO waiting for someone to provide them with a price tag for that cloud-native infrastructure. A recent FinOps Foundation survey with 195 respondents — 75% of whom reported […]

This week, we published scores for our 2020 cloud predictions. This is an exercise we do every year to hold us — the prediction-makers — accountable to our predictions. We assess if our predictions came to pass and explicitly call out if we were vague, too aggressive, or just simply wrong. Although we pride ourselves […]

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. […]

Today Paul Miller, Tracy Woo, and I released our report that examines the market impact of the GAIA-X project. France and Germany announced an initiative in 2019, which was formalized as the GAIA-X Foundation in early October 2020. For our report, we spoke with several of the GAIA-X founders and studied its potential impact for […]

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 […]