Europe from space

Public Domain image of Europe, derived from NASA World Wind data, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

The hyperscale global clouds seem to crop up pretty much everywhere, these days. But we all know that customer requirements differ, from industry to industry, and from country to country. So… how do they cope, and how do we account for the peculiarities of different markets?

Today, we publish our latest take on the public cloud platforms market in Europe: The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Public Cloud Platforms In Europe, Q4 2016Read the report itself, or sign up for my 3 November webinar to learn more.

The report (my first Wave, so allow me to feel pleased with myself) is, of course, interesting and useful in and of itself. But what's more interesting, perhaps, is that it's part of a collaboration that allows Forrester to account for those regional quirks.

Over in the States, my colleagues Dave Bartoletti and John Rymer laid out their premise, and defined a set of criteria they wished to measure. That's how Waves usually get done. But then they actively involved their colleagues in Australia and New Zealand, China, and Europe, encouraging us to validate those criteria and to identify particular issues that mattered more in our regions than they might from a global (US-centric) view of the world. All of this means that we end up with a core set of global criteria (and scores), a common process, and a small set of local criteria (such as multi-lingual support, in Europe). We really can begin to compare the relative strengths of global cloud providers in different regions, and introduce significant local players without the reach to figure in a single global analysis. Four Waves (plus a likely fifth) allow both vendors and customers to understand the different picture in each region. The Wave graphics clearly show the Leaders, the Strong Performers, the Contenders, and the Challengers. Positioning is important, but the way that positioning changes from region to region is particularly telling: we'll be digging further into that aspect of things very soon. Do the Leaders always lead? Do Strong Performers draw closer to the Leaders in some regions than in others? Yes, of course they do. Because features dismissed as niche in one market are fundamental in another.

Taken together, these Waves offer a great insight into the public cloud platforms market today. Take a look, and do let us know if the results match your impression. And remember that one of the values of a Wave is that you can download the underlying spreadsheet and adjust the weightings to better reflect your own specific set of requirements.