Forrester Research names Red Hat as a Leader in Infrastructure Automation

Forrester Research identified the 11 most significant infrastructure automation providers and researched, analyzed, and scored them. Red Hat and the other top providers were evaluated for The Forrester Wave™ against 30 criteria grouped into three categories: current offering, strategy, and market presence. In the evaluation, Red Hat received the highest possible scores in 13 criteria, including community support, product vision, execution roadmap, planned enhancements, innovation roadmap, supporting products and services, partner ecosystem, revenue, and average deal size. 

According to Forrester’s evaluation, “Red Hat sets the pace of the market by addressing operational challenges, skill gaps, and budgetary pressures. Its strength lies in its community, which has led to solid partnerships and supporting services. Red Hat capitalizes on this ecosystem by adopting and embracing the work of contributors. Key upcoming features include trusted automation supply chain, Event-Driven Ansible, and AI-led automation through Project Wisdom.”

Modeling, Compliance, and Vulnerability Support Differentiate Vendors

As the infrastructure automation platform market matures, customers are seeking solutions that go beyond classic configuration management and automation orchestration use cases, looking for modeling, compliance, and vulnerability management capabilities. The trend is toward holistic automation solutions that address multiple personas: I&O, compliance, and vulnerability management professionals.

As a result of these trends, infrastructure automation platform customers should look for providers that:

• Offer advanced visual models that enable cost and capacity analysis. 

While all the tools in this Forrester WaveTM offer text-based infrastructure models, some take it to the next level by letting customers manipulate visualizations of not only automation workflows but also the models themselves. Leaders go a step further by providing cost and capacity analysis as part of their modeling capabilities.

•  Support rich compliance functionality that goes beyond I&O. 

The Leaders in this Forrester Wave don’t focus solely on I&O use cases — some support common requirements such as CIS, PCI DSS, HIPAA and SOX out of the box. 1 The best also provide dashboards specifically for compliance professionals as well as integration with engines such as Qualys, Rapid7, and Tenable.

• Advance SecOps with rich vulnerability management capabilities. 

While nearly all the solutions offer custom vulnerability lists to import, some go a step beyond by offering out-of-the-box support for CIS and DISA STIGs. 2 The best solutions also offer their own patch management engines in addition to what-if analysis.

Evaluation Overview

The vendors were evaluated against 26 criteria, which we grouped into three high-level categories:

• Current offering. 

Each vendor’s position on the vertical axis of the Forrester Wave graphic indicates the strength of its current offering. Key criteria for these solutions include deployment, infrastructure management, integrations, governance and compliance, and community support.

• Strategy. 

Placement on the horizontal axis indicates the strength of the vendors’ strategies. It was  evaluated with product vision, execution roadmap, planned enhancements, innovation roadmap,supporting products and services, and partner ecosystem.

• Market presence. 

Represented by the size of the markers on the graphic, our market presence scores reflect each vendor’s revenue, number of customers, and average deal size.

Red Hat Evaluation Result

Red Hat continues to leverage a powerful open source community to grow. Red Hat (part of IBM) submitted Ansible Automation Platform for this evaluation; it consists of Ansible Tower, Engine, Automation Services Catalog, and Automation Analytics and Automation Hub. Red Hat Insights, included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) subscriptions, augments the solution by providing remediation suggestions. The solution orchestrates reusable automation workflows,performs analytics of workflow runs, and integrates with DevOps toolchains.

Ansible continues to grow quickly, particularly among enterprises that are automating networks. The solution excels at providing a variety of deployment options and acting as a service broker to a wide array of other automation tools. A robust community ecosystem contributes to Ansible’s success. Compared with those of its competitors, the solution could do a better job of model editing. Reference customers praised the solution’s integration capabilities as well as Red Hat’s willingness to reevaluate its licensing model. They were less impressed with Ansible’s documentation and modularity of code. Red Hat’s solution is a good fit for customers that want a holistic automation platform that integrates with a wide array of other vendors’ infrastructure. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals select the right one for their needs.

Forrester’s research uncovered a market in which VMware, Red Hat, Microsoft, and Cisco areLeaders; Chef Software, Turbonomic, Resolve Systems, BMC Software, Puppet, SaltStack, andMicro Focus are Strong Performers; Canonical is a Contender; and Northern.tech is a Challenger.

Courses from Red Hat that allows one to understand Ansible for Infrastructure Automation

RH294 – Red Hat Enterprise Linux Automation with Ansible 

DO374 – Developing Advanced Automation with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

DO467 – Managing Enterprise Automation with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform