At long last, The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Cost Management And Optimization [CCMO] Solutions, Q3 2024 is published! This process is incredibly long and thorough. We go through hours-long briefings and customer calls and perform multiple iterations on scoring; the vendors go through the same. They put in many hours setting up customer references, product demonstrations, and strategy briefings, and then writing responses. To the vendors that participated, my sincere thanks.

This report is an update from 2022. We evaluated the top 12 vendors in this space: Broadcom, CloudBolt Software, CloudZero, Flexera, Harness, IBM, Kion, Morpheus Data, NetApp, Nutanix, OpenText, and Virtana. Each vendor was evaluated and scored across 25 criteria that dug into their CCMO product capabilities, strategy, roadmap, and commercial model. If you’re evaluating your current CCMO tool or are in the process of selecting a tool, I encourage you to take a look.

Given the enormous lift for this evaluation, I wanted to share some trends I saw and even a few items that didn’t make it into the report itself:

• Hyperscalers are leading the way for CCMO capabilities. The yesteryear of “dumpster fire” native cloud management solutions are long gone. Except for multicloud visibility and optimization, the major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) have accelerated past third-party CCMO tools. Few third-party vendors offer capabilities like serverless and GPU right-sizing or cost and performance trade-offs between Graviton and x86 instances. Better yet, these features are API-accessible, which opens the door to an easier semi-DIY CCMO path for anyone tech-savvy or motivated enough to build their own tool.
• CCMO vendors that aren’t supporting FOCUS are lagging. At FinOps X, the FinOps Foundation announced general availability of the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) Version 1.0, which is the unifying specification for cloud billing. If you’re in FinOps and haven’t heard about FOCUS, get reading. This Linux Foundation-backed open-source project is a big deal. All three hyperscalers are heavily involved. AWS announced support for FOCUS data exports. Azure allows users to download cost and usage data in the FOCUS format. Google Cloud offers a FOCUS BigQuery view and Looker template to export and visualize FOCUS-formatted cost and usage data. Multicloud billing data standardization means that everyone who manages cloud spend or has built adjacent cost tooling can now work higher up the stack. CCMO vendors that don’t support FOCUS are standardizing on a soon to be antiquated process.
• Generative AI cost optimization isn’t a differentiation — yet. The past 18 months have brought a frenzied rush to generative AI. Everyone is exploring how to incorporate generative AI into their processes and product offerings. The same is true for CCMO, where some vendors have already injected generative AI capabilities into their solutions. Don’t be fooled. Generative AI in CCMO doesn’t add huge value — yet. From what I’ve witnessed across the CCMO space and even beyond the vendors in this Wave evaluation, generative AI in CCMO is another way of adding a fancy search engine into your product. For now, generative AI in CCMO means an easier way to find a function, discover a source of a cost aberration, or pull up a report. The promise of generative AI will be fulfilled in the next few years. It’s just not here yet.

The world of FinOps and its associated tooling is furiously evolving, and FOCUS is leading the charge. The promise of billing standardization, expansion of FinOps tooling to include more than just infrastructure spend, the rise of deeper and mostly free capabilities from the hyperscalers, and the beginning of multicloud billing data ingestion from Azure and now Google Cloud will make for a very interesting next 12 months. End users have difficult choices to make. Do they build a semi-DIY solution from the native cloud management capabilities or choose third-party tooling? CCMO vendors are being pushed to differentiate higher up the stack. Multicloud visibility and optimization isn’t enough anymore.

If you’d like to discuss these findings or the cloud cost management landscape at large, please schedule an inquiry or guidance session ([email protected]). In the meantime, happy reading.