Forrester forecasts that the public cloud market in China will more than double in the next five years, from $1.8 billion in 2015 to $3.8 billion in 2020. Two-thirds of Chinese software decision-makers surveyed by Forrester are making the increased use of public cloud platforms one of their top priorities for the next 12 months.

Enterprise public cloud platform vendors in China are improving in terms of their service diversity, simple abstraction for operational efficiency, and operational autonomy for on-demand elasticity. To assess the state of the enterprise public cloud platforms market in China and see how the vendors stack up against each other, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of top enterprise public cloud platform vendors.

The 11 vendors included in the report are: Alibaba, AWS, ChinaC, DaoCloud, JD.com, Microsoft, MoPaaS, QingCloud, Tencent, UCloud, and UnitedStack. Here are some key findings from the evaluation:

  • Microsoft, Alibaba, and AWS lead the pack. Global vendors AWS and Microsoft and local Internet giant Alibaba are the leaders in the market. All three have strong market leadership due to their extensive breadth of platform and application services, broad language support, strong security controls, and outstanding reliability. Alibaba has the largest number of ecosystems — technology partners, software-as-a-service (SaaS) partners, and consulting partners — in China; AWS and Microsoft have the strongest product strategy due to their focus on the user experience and blending of infrastructure and platform-based services.
  • MoPaaS, QingCloud, and Tencent offer competitive options. Tencent did well on many of the major criteria, especially breadth of service and storage, but was not as strong or consistent as the Leaders. QingCloud provides competitive IaaS solutions for public, private, and hybrid cloud deployment scenarios but lacks ALM coverage and certifications. MoPaaS, the first member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation in China, has strong infrastructure abstraction capabilities and good coverage of platform and application services, but its support for features like platform configuration and development and testing tools is limited.
  • ChinaC, UnitedStack, UCloud, JD.com, and DaoCloud lack complete offerings. These vendors are all China-based. ChinaC has good reliability due to its data centers across China, but some key features, like autoscaling, are still in beta. UCloud has broad storage support and good platform configuration features but lacks ALM coverage, especially development and testing tools. JD.com has good monitoring and application deployment support, but its language support and infrastructure abstraction capabilities are limited. UnitedStack has a strong product strategy for local vendors but few partners and little experience.