Determining which public cloud platforms your company should standardize on is not a matter of marketshare, size or growth rate. What matters most is fit for purpose – yours. And that’s exactly what our latest Forrester Wave of this market helps you determine. 
 
And the key questions to ask have nothing to do with the vendors in question. They are all about you – your team’s skill sets, needs and requirements. Will you mostly be building lightweight web and mobile applications from common web services you’d rather not recreate yourself? What skills do your developers bring to the problem – deep knowledge of Java and C# but light on the infrastructure configuration and middleware management front? Need to ensure data residency in specific geographies? Compliancy top your concerns list? These factors are far more important than feature by feature comparisons. Ultimately your platform selection needs to match your business requirements, and if our surveys can be trusted, you desire agility and developer productivity over most other concerns.
 
Where Amazon Web Services may best suit your DevOps teams with strong desire to control everything themselves, your web properties team may be far more productive on Mendix or Outsystems.
 
This is why the Forrester Wave doesn’t give you a single answer for who is best in this market but the tools to make the right call for your business. In our latest iteration we evaluated the breadth of cloud platform leaders from those delivering pure infrastructure value, through to those who abstract away the virtual configuration and scale challenges, so you can concentrate on code or visual design. Want to know which fits you best, download the Excel spreadsheet that accompanies this report and edit the criteria priority fields. This is where customers can tune the Wave to their specific circumstances and needs (as shown below).
 
Customize criteria weightings to match your company's needs
 
What pops out when you do this is a custom view of the vendor ranking aligned to your needs and your teams’ skill sets. The spreadsheet can then be used to craft an effective Request for Quote among the top vendors and any others you are evaluating who may not have participated in our analysis.
 
But don’t start from zero. There’s a good chance your developers are already using two or more public clouds to meet immediate business needs. Trying to talk them out of their choice and into a strategic partner IT selects will be like taking the iPhones our of your executives hands – good luck with that. How the Forrester Wave can help you best is in determining which platforms your developers standardize on going forward for what types of uses. You will likely end up with multiple cloud platforms but only 1 or 2 that are strategic. From early developer use to this final outcome is how our Waves can help. 
 
And if you have significant concerns about the security capabilities of the leading cloud platforms, you can get a deep dive look at this in the Forrester Wave: Public Cloud Platform Service Providers' Security by Andras Cser and Ed Ferrara. 
 
Read both reports today by downloading our iPad app from the iTunes http://itunes.apple.comAppStore. We look forward to assisting you in your strategic selections.