Our new “The Forrester Wave™: Full-Stack Public Cloud Development Platforms In China, Q3 2018” report is now live! This Wave evaluation uncovered a market in which Alibaba Cloud, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Tencent Cloud, and Huawei lead the pack. Baidu Cloud, JD Cloud, Kingsoft Cloud, and QingCloud offer strong alternatives. UCloud, Ping An Technology, and Net Ease lag behind.
The public cloud development platforms (PCDP) market is the most important market segment aiming to maximize agility on both the infrastructure and development layers. Here’s some key takeaways about the market from our research:

  • Full-stack vendors are aligning go-to-market strategies to their competencies and histories. Global companies have been working hard to localize the cloud services available in their home markets to China. Chinese digital giants are embracing emerging technologies to further expand into the enterprise space. Formerly infrastructure-focused vendors are now adding more capabilities on the development layer, and other vendors that have roots in eCommerce and finance are leveraging their capabilities in those areas to drive cloud business.
  • Full-stack vendors are racing to use emerging tech to out-innovate each other. Vendors are turning to emerging technologies when it comes to innovations. They not only can help vendors enhance their existing cloud services but also can help enterprise customers speed up along their digital innovation road map. Bare-metal, graphics process unit (GPU) configurations, AI, IoT, CaaS, FaaS, blockchain, etc. are helping PCDP vendors to achieve that.
  • Vendors in the market are starting to build enterprise-focused services that were lacking in earlier cloud platforms. To better serve enterprise customers, PCDP vendors are enhancing their product features in CI/CD, hybrid cloud management, application migration, and security certifications.

To assess the state of this market in China and see how the vendors stack up against each other, we developed a comprehensive set of criteria in three high-level buckets: current offering, strategy, and market presence. The criteria and their weightings are based on past research and user inquiries, as well as vendor and expert interviews.
This Forrester Wave is intended to be a starting point only. We encourage Forrester clients to download the excel sheet associated with the Forrester Wave graphic (the bubble chart!), view detailed product evaluations, and adapt the criteria weightings to fit their needs and see their products’ custom rankings.
We are also curious to hear about your experiences with selecting and using these platforms if you’d like to share. For example, what are the factors that necessitate or motivate your purchasing decision? And if you need Forrester’s help in selecting a public cloud development vendor, just reach out to us through inquiry, advisory, project consulting work, etc.