In 2011, my colleague James Staten and I published two light-weight vendor assessments on the private cloud and public cloud market. These solutions sit at the extremes of the IaaS market. To kick off 2013, I published a full vendor evaluation of a market that sits in between these two IaaS deployment types — hosted private cloud. Forrester's Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2012 showed that 46% of enterprises are prioritizing investments in private clouds in 2013. While slightly more than half plan to build a private cloud in their own data center, more than 25% said they prefer to rent one. Hosted private cloud opens the door to a variety of benefits: 1) You reach cloud from day one. 2) Compute is dedicated from other clients. 3) It can enable future hybrid scenarios. 4) Easier-to-meet licensing and compliancy requirements. 5) Outsourcing the setup of the cloud and management of the infrastructure to focus on support and utilization. 

Overall this report revealed no leaders, but it did show some strengths and weaknesses across the market and provide framework and sample criteria to assess vendors within this space. This research process also revealed some unexpected nuances within this space: 

•   Hosted private cloud and virtual private cloud are often used interchangeably within the market — despite being distinct deployment types. 
•   Level and method of dedication varies greatly by solution. 
•   Layers managed differ greatly by solution. 
•   Although agility is a benefit, few enable self-service access to resources to its end users. Ticket-based request systems are common.
•   Many enterprises are using hosted private cloud for some unexpected advantages:

1) Capacity management simplification and eliminating small resource procurement.

2) Advancing its traditional outsourcing resources and slowly enabling application modernization.

3) Bypassing internal politics to start chargeback for IT resource usage.

If you'd like to read the full report, click here. Don't forget about the spreadsheet in the right panel. This explicitly details score explanations for each vendor. Bonus: You can reweight the criteria to customize the evaluation for your business! 

Register for the webinar on this report! It's next Wednesday, February 20th from 11 to 12 (ET). You'll be able to ask questions about this space during the call.