Anyone familiar to Forrester knows the Wave drill: 1) we take the top vendors in a space, 2) do a massive data collection process, 3) evaluate each, and 4) share our findings. We've been evaluating this market since Q2 2011. For our 2016 evaluation, we used 40-criteria to evaluate the following vendors — BMC, Cisco, Citrix, HPE, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware.

Days before this report was scheduled to go live, Citrix announced it would be selling CloudPlatform to Accelerite. Back in July 2011, Citrix bought Cloud.com for over $200 million. This solution became CloudStack and was soon after gifted to the Apache Foundation. Citrix's distro of CloudStack, CloudPlatform has long been the leading CloudStack distribution. It had hopes that CloudStack would become the premier open source cloud platform in the private cloud space. Back in 2013, there was no shortage of articles comparing OpenStack with CloudStack in terms of momentum, community, ease of use, and strength of the solution. However, this discussion has long been dead. OpenStack took the lead and remains the defacto open source standard in the private cloud market. Although there are still many clouds still based on CloudStack, its audience is waning. This announcement is seemingly the end of that saga. Although Citrix didn't comment on its reasons for selling CloudPlatform, it seems clear that they are shifting their focus to one of hybrid cloud management atop multiple cloud platforms. Although Citrix has not announced the sale price of CloudPlatform relative to the initial purchase price. 

In other news, the private cloud market is looking up, with significant progress in self-service access, full automation of provisioning tasks, and tracking and metering of resources. 

See the full report here.