It’s Cool Being a Gartner Cool Vendor

Mark Weiner

Each year, Gartner recognizes innovative technology companies as Cool Vendors across various market segments. Volterra is both humbled and thrilled to be named a 2020 Cool Vendor in Cloud Computing.

This year’s report, Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing, authored by analysts Sid Nag, Arun Chandrasekaran, Raj Bala, Craig Lowery, states that “innovation in cloud computing continues to accelerate at a rapid pace in cloud infrastructure and platform services. CIOs should assess these Cool Vendors, who are disrupting the cloud market with their innovative approach in enabling operationalization of cloud-native platforms."

In our opinion, Gartner’s recognition of Volterra and the challenges that enterprises are facing as they evolve their development and operations to become more cloud-native reinforces the fundamental concept our company was founded upon – that modern, distributed apps require equally modern, distributed and cloud-native infrastructure to achieve their business transformation objectives. Volterra’s cloud-native app networking and security stack, offered as-a-service, does just that.

Gartner analysts Arun Chandrasekaran and Sid Nag state that “while there is growing interest indeveloping applications using cloud-native platforms, lack of operational know-how and inability to hire the right talent continue to be significant bottlenecks in the path to production.” At Volterra, we hear repeatedly from customers that their journey to become cloud-native — in bothdevelopment and operations — will be long and performed in multiple steps or stages. One specific area of challenge is enabling a cultural transition and increased collaboration between newer DevOps and existing I&O teams. This is something that Gartner analysts identify in the Best Networking Practices in a DevOps World, published 6 May 2020, where Andrew Lerner and George Spafford summarize “in theory, DevOps includes all aspects of infrastructure; but in practice, networking is largely disconnected from DevOps initiatives, particularly within on-premises data centers.”

Another challenge noted in Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing is that “scaling cloud-native efforts across distributed locations needs effective security, observability, integration, automation, centralized management and governance that often exceeds the capacity and skillsof IT teams.” In other words, it’s hard enough to make your primary public cloud resources and environment cloud-native but is a factor harder to do that across multiple clusters, locations (private/hybrid, edge, etc) and even different providers. This is an area Volterra has innovated in extensively, and why our VoltMesh service provides a distributed load balancer/Kubernetes ingress-egress gateway, API gateway, WAF, DDoS, API security and more, all with a centralized control plane and end-to-end visibility and policy control.

If that sounds interesting, I welcome you to try our free or low-cost self-service offering, and, while you’re at it, check out the other innovative vendors (Opsani, Pensando, RackN, Serverless) that Gartner names in this year’s Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing report.

Gartner “Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing” by Sid Nag, Arun Chandrasekaran, Raj Bala, Craig Lowery, September 17, 2020 (Gartner subscription required).

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Mark Weiner

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