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Working closely with colleagues in North America and Asia, we just published the third of three related Forrester Waves on Hosted Private Cloud. Lauren Nelson kept all of us on track, and led work on the North American document. Charlie Dai took the lead for the Asia Pacific version, and I led the final – European – report.

Vendors assessed here in Europe were CenturyLink, IBM, Interoute, NTT Communications, OVH, Tieto, and Virtustream. (note: the OVH product assessed in Europe was not the same as the former vCloud Air solution assessed as ‘OVH’ in North America. Read both Waves for more context, if needed)

I will be recording a webinar to discuss the European findings on Thursday 7 September. Clients can sign up here for the live experience, or catch up on-demand afterwards.

This is the second multi-region Wave I have been involved with. Last year, we tried something similar for Public Cloud Platforms. That resulted in Waves for ‘global,’ China, Australia and New Zealand, and Europe. We also produced a separate report on regional similarities and differences, and on-demand webinars to discuss the global, European, and combined perspectives.

Public cloud platforms continue to attract much of the cloud mindshare, and they are definitely growing strongly in all significant markets. The arguments that public clouds cannot scale, are not secure, are not ‘enterprise-grade,’ and will never be allowed by regulators to host sensitive workloads are being dismantled one by one. We can all point to customer references that disprove each of them. But there is still a role for various flavours of private cloud, and Lauren Nelson did some initial work to define these use cases back in 2015. Figures quoted in the recent Waves clearly show that organisations are becoming more considered in their use of private clouds in general, and hosted private clouds in particular. It’s increasingly rare to see an organisation launch a bold private cloud strategy that seeks to give developers and line of business divisions everything they might find in AWS or Azure… safely fenced off inside some corporate data centre. Instead, they’re explicitly developing hybrid strategies that let public cloud do what it’s good at, let hosted private clouds play to their strengths, keep on-premises private clouds for specific use cases, and recognise that parts of the computing landscape may not fit a cloud delivery model at all.