The clearest signal is that hybrid cloud management is losing ground to lighter multicloud and cost-focused platforms. That shift is not a marketing repositioning; it reflects buyer behavior, declining product revenue, and weaker vendor participation. Suites built to manage heavy private-cloud estates are being displaced by tools that cover public cloud first and only selectively extend on premises. For practitioners, the implication is strategic: platform breadth matters less than fit, speed of deployment, and the ability to support actual operating patterns.
The evaluation itself reinforces that change in what matters operationally. By dropping infrastructure automation functions and giving more weight to governance, operational intelligence, and artifact creation, the framework favors controls and coordination over deep build-out capabilities. The growing interest in asset management across cloud and on-premises environments also points to a concrete pain point: enterprises want unified visibility to reduce duplication, detect shadow IT, and avoid license violations. That is why some vendors separate these capabilities into add-ons rather than core features.
A second practical takeaway is that faster release cadence is not automatically better. Moving from monthly or multiweek updates to biweekly delivery can increase defects, service disruption, and upgrade effort, especially when customers have heavily customized the product. That matters because the biggest operational friction often comes from deviation from the standard configuration, not from the release model alone. The broader conclusion is sober: choose on demonstrable fit and operational tolerance, not ranking position, because the most feature-rich platform may be the hardest to live with.
- Multicloud and cloud cost management rise as demand for private cloud lowers. Decreasing product revenue, increased public cloud adoption, and decreased vendor participation indicate that the hybrid cloud management is contracting in favor of tools that are focused more on multicloud management (public cloud focus with some on-premises capabilities) and less on building out fully functioning private cloud and managing heavy and complex hybrid cloud environments. The more complex, full feature suites are finding it difficult competing with the lighter-weight, less expensive solutions that take less time and resources to use and run. Although private clouds are still kicking, often they have morphed into infrastructure automation journeys, agile-plus-DevOps transformations, multicloud container platform development, and hyperconverged infrastructure solution powered.
- The value of asset management is obvious, but it’s still early days. We’ve seen an uptick in interest around cloud operations and IT asset management in the cloud. Customers are asking for better coordination in cost and data between cloud and on-premises assets. Enterprises want to see all their assets together to avoid duplication and license violations and to discover shadow IT. A few leading vendors provide asset management capabilities, but most offer these as separate products that you must pay an additional amount for.
- Continuous improvement doesn’t necessarily mean continually better. Software vendors are expected to manage their products using modern development techniques. Many cloud management vendors have made the switch from multiweek or monthly major updates to biweekly — but this journey hasn’t been well received. Customers mentioned higher disruption of service with multiple bugs being introduced. In fact, they noted multiple working days lost trying to fix upgrades. But this journey is typical of any new agile-plus-DevOps journey. There’s always pain moving to a faster process where aspects of legacy processes and technology still remain. Customers are all too willing to point out inadequacies and slow to notice improvements. It is important to note that customers with the largest issues were customizing the product more where their deviation from the standard product led to upgrade challenges.
Learnings From Our Hybrid Cloud Management Forrester Wave™
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