Red Hat, Google, and Rancher Labs scored prime spots in Forrester Research’s latest ranking of multicloud container development platforms, which is another way of saying Kubernetes-based hosted platforms. Those three ranked ahead of five other vendors on the list including VMware, D2iQ, and Mirantis.

The ranking included what Forrester identified as the “eight most significant” vendors that were then scored on a 29-point evaluation. It did include another vendor – SUSE – that declined to participate. But, that shouldn’t matter too much as SUSE has since acquired Rancher Labs.

Amongst the “leaders,” Red Hat “offers the leading platform for both developers and operators,” the Forrester Research claims. It added that the company, and new parent IBM, have continued to focus their container efforts on its Kubernetes-heavy OpenShift platform that “is the most widely deployed multicloud container platform and boasts powerful development and unified operations experiences across many public and on-premises platforms.”

Those accolades, along with a nice recurring revenue stream, might have made IBM’s $34 billion purchase of Red Hat seem reasonable.

Reference customers tapped by Forrester Research for insight did note that Red Hat could improve multi-cluster visibility, serverless development, and entry pricing. But that was not enough to knock the vendor out of its top spot in the ranking.

Google also garnered a “leaders” spot, with the vendor’s Anthos platform applauded for its integrated approach to container management. Forrester Research noted that platform’s inclusion of the “popular [Google Kubernetes Engine] service, cloud-based configuration management, logging, and monitoring, and a cloud-native developer environment combining Cloud Run for serverless development and Anthos Service Mesh.”

“Google demonstrated excellent developer and operator experience across the cloud-native application lifecycle through its abstractions and powerful DevOps automations,” the report added.

On the to-be-fixed side, Forrester Research wrote that “its multicloud deployment options and edge computing support need improvement.”

Rancher Labs was the smallest player in the report’s “leaders” ranking. Reference customers highlighted the vendor’s “comprehensive application catalog coverage, broad public cloud infrastructure integrations, strong participation in the cloud-native open source community, excellent customer support, rock-solid stability, and fast time-to-value.” Those attributes were enough for SUSE, which is plugging in Rancher Labs’ Kubernetes management platform alongside its own focus on Linux, edge computing, and artificial intelligence (AI).

VMware just missed out on the “leaders” ranking, instead being tagged as a “strong performer.” This placement can be viewed in two lights: one is that VMware has made strong inroads from its legacy virtual machine (VM) focus into the more cloud native-based container market; or two, that it still trails in a space where it has thrown billions of dollars in an attempt to conquer.

The Forrester Research dive looked at VMware’s Tanzu platform, which the vendor has been quickly expanding across its portfolio. It found that reference customers were high on Tanzu’s reliability, hypervisor-based security features, developer experience, multicloud deployment options, and day 2 lifecycle operations. And that Tanzu was a great option for existing VMware customers, which is something that VMware COO Sanjay Poonen had previously touted.

VMware demerits included slow innovation when integrating “multiple point products,” an unclear product roadmap, complex pricing, and the need for better serverless support.

D2iQ and Platform9 were also grouped in the “strong performer” category, which should be seen as a victory for two firms with a fraction of the financial wherewithal of VMware. The same could be said for “contenders” Mirantis, which did participate with the Docker Enterprise platform it acquired from Docker Inc., and Canonical, which continues to slowly integrate Kubernetes into its container plans.

Notably absent from the Forrester Research report were managed offerings from cloud giants like Amazon and Microsoft. A recent Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) user survey found that their respective Kubernetes-based container management platforms were up among the most highly used by organizations.