Vision? Execution? Sadly, omission and confusion rule Gartner's virty quadrant

A snapshot of the past

I've discussed a lot of companies in the "virtualisation" space. Ordinarily, I'd get uppity about Cisco being excluded, too. Cisco bought both Metacloud and Piston Cloud and is now a very credible and capable OpenStack player. Of course, these are relatively recent events, so I'll give Gartner the benefit of the doubt and say that its report is simply a snapshot of the past.

But that's the problem right there, isn't it?

Let's look at the example of Odin. Parallels changed the name of its service provider business – which includes the Virtuozzo container software – to Odin in March 2015. Odin is listed as "Odin" on the Magic Quadrant, not Parallels. Thus it could be rationally concluded that the "freeze" for this Magic Quadrant was some time after March 1, 2015.

As it happens, March 1, 2015 is the one date mentioned in the document. This gives us a timeframe to understand what Gartner's understanding of the world was.

March 1, 2015 is more than enough time to understand that Microsoft wasn't going to get the next version of Windows Server out the door until 2016, including Microsoft's rumoured – but not yet delivered – containers technology.

It's enough time to see IBM's Softlayer successes start racking up and to understand that "virtualisation" and "storage" will never be separate again.

It's surely enough time to include a host of major players including – at a minimum – IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Ericsson, HDS and Nutanix.

Given all of the above, I – like many others – will be justified in having questions about what it takes to get on Gartner's Magic Quadrant, and concerns about how positions are determined. ®