VMware and Micro Focus led a strong field of rivals in Forrester’s latest ranking of hybrid cloud management platforms that noted real differentiation in the market is driven by the depth of support rather than the breadth of that support.

The report included nine vendors, with VMware and Micro Focus the only two to garner a place in The Forrester Wave leader category. The former included its vRealize Suite, vRealize Network Insight, CloudHealth offerings, while the latter was represented solely by its Hybrid Cloud Management platform.

Forrester explained that reference customers gave high marks to VMware’s “completeness of features and usability, cross-platform support, multi-cloud cost visibility, and support services.” However, they chided the vendor for a lack of upgrade paths between its major product updates and the usual issue of high pricing. “One customer pointed out a 20% cost increase between VMware and alternative platforms,” the report stated.

Those highs and lows equaled out to VMware being “a good fit for large enterprises with established data centers that are extending management to public cloud.”

Micro Focus rode assets that it acquired from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in 2016 to its leadership status in the report. It was applauded for a strong portfolio of internal products targeted at easing private cloud management and support services. However, reference customers wanted a more robust API selection, quicker migration, and better training options.

Morpheus Data, Flexera, BMC Software, and Nutanix were included in the report’s “strong performers” category. IBM and ServiceNow were both placed in the report’s “contenders” band, with Canonical the lone entry sitting in its “challengers” category.

The report noted that a rash of recent mergers and acquisitions has left many in the market with a similar breadth of support for most of the major cloud platforms. Thus it suggested that enterprises focus on the depth of platform support when selecting a vendor.

“Every vendor in this evaluation supports Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and VMware vSphere-based clouds,” it stated. “Vendors differentiate with the breadth of cloud platforms they support (e.g., Alibaba, Google Cloud Platform [GCP], Hyper-V, OpenStack, or Oracle) and specific compute, storage, network, and database services across those clouds. … At a minimum, solutions should offer lifecycle management and discovery across all supported platforms and services, with provisioning for core infrastructure services. Leaders differentiate with added performance visibility, cost visibility and optimization, and tag management across all supported platforms.”