Rancher Recognized as a Leader in Latest Forrester Wave

The enterprise Kubernetes management space has definitely become a lot more crowded over the past two years as traditional vendors and startups alike attempt to grab a slice of this massive market. The increasingly competitive vendor landscape makes Forrester’s recent recognition of Rancher Labs that much more meaningful.

This week, Forrester Research named Rancher Labs a "Leader" in The Forrester Wave™: Multicloud Container Development Platforms, Q3, 2020 report. The report explains how cloud-native technologies like containers and Kubernetes are becoming the preferred tools to build new software experiences and modernize existing apps at scale and across clouds. The report then highlights Rancher’s leadership among eight significant enterprise container platform vendors and one of only three providers recognized as Leaders, based on Forrester’s evaluation of 29 criteria measuring the strength of each vendors’ current offering, strategy and market presence.

Why Rancher is a Leader in Multi-Cloud Container Development

Some of the highlights from the report include:

• Rancher is 100 percent open source, embraces and extends native public cloud container services, focuses on intuitive, simplified DevOps automation and specializes in helping companies operate Kubernetes at massive scale and in edge computing scenarios.
• Rancher includes a comprehensive application catalog, centralized visibility and control of distributed clusters, service mesh innovations, built-in CI/CD pipelines, broad runtime and registry support, and very strong ‘Day 2’ cluster operations.
• Reference customers praised Rancher for our “comprehensive application catalog coverage, broad public cloud infrastructure integrations, strong participation in the cloud-native open source community, excellent customer support and rock-solid stability combined with fast time to value.”

As you may recall, Rancher was previously named a leader in the Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Container Platform Software Suites, Q4 2018. To understand the foundation of our success and continued market leadership, you need to have a clear picture of how the Kubernetes market has evolved and keep in mind the adage, “Begin with the end in mind.” When Kubernetes first emerged out of Google, it was designed for managing large, complex, homogeneous clusters. It was also data center-centric and not designed for cloud infrastructure. The early value of Kubernetes was in a vendor’s certified Kubernetes distribution and a vendor’s differentiation was delivered through a vertically integrated, proprietary solution stack. Today, many vendors still see this as the correct approach to Kubernetes, but at Rancher, we believe this approach leads to higher cost, increased complexity and vendor lock-in.

Rancher’s No Lock-in Approach to Kubernetes

Rancher has always had a clear vision of enterprise Kubernetes management as a means to enabling a computing everywhere experience based upon an open approach to open source software. That’s why we designed Rancher from Day 1 to support heterogeneous infrastructure, including hybrid cloud, multi-cloud and edge. We also recognized that Kubernetes distributions would rapidly commoditize and, therefore, have focused our value on management simplicity and consistency across multiple, certified clusters from any vendor, at massive scale.

So, unlike competitors who still see Kubernetes as a means to lock customers into a monolithic, legacy software stack, we see the value of Kubernetes as a means to provide a consistent, compute everywhere platform across data center, cloud and edge. We are grateful to Forrester for acknowledging our unique approach to enterprise Kubernetes management in the most recent Forrester Wave, highlighting:

• Rancher’s ability to simplify multicloud Kubernetes management at scale.
• Rancher’s pervasive deployment across a broad range of enterprise and cloud-native companies, who are using it to run large-scale clusters across many public and on-premises platforms.
• Rancher as an ideal solution for firms seeking a proven multi-cloud container management platform available across a wide variety of cloud platforms and edge environments.

Being recognized as a leader by Forrester Research is strong validation of our computing everywhere vision and our continued investment in innovation. As containerized applications continue to proliferate across on-premises, cloud, and Edge environments, Rancher’s “begin with the end and mind” approach and focus on openness, innovation, and simplicity will continue to differentiate us from the competition.