Nordcloud positioned as a Visionary in The Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Public Cloud IT Transformation Services

We’ve long been a cloud-native fixture in Gartner® Magic Quadrants. 2021 marked a new achievement, with Nordcloud positioned as Visionary in the Magic Quadrant™ for Public Cloud IT Transformation Services.

This upward trajectory shows the value our cloud-native approach brings to organisations.

What the Magic Quadrant™ report said about us

Nordcloud is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant and is headquartered in Helsinki, Finland. IBM recently announced its intended acquisition of Nordcloud to enhance IBM’s cloud- native capabilities. Nordcloud has global capabilities, but focuses mainly on Europe and APAC. Its primary verticals include automotive, financial services and manufacturing. Nordcloud’s revenue for services in this MQ grew about 8% last year. It performed over 200 cloud-native/agile applications engagements with a DevOps style of delivery last year and has about 75 clients with managed cloud services. Nordcloud uses automation with modularity and a holistic transformation tied to business outcome contracts. Nordcloud supports multicloud use cases and has the following cloud service providers: Amazon Web Services (Expert MSP Partner with DevOps competency), Microsoft Azure (MSP) and Google (MSP). 

On 21 December 2020, IBM announced that it was acquiring Nordcloud, with the acquisition being completed in mid-February 2021. This analysis focuses on the vendor’s performance prior to the acquisition. 

Strengths 

• Easy to navigate offerings: Nordcloud aims to be the bridge between the capabilities of the public cloud and the aspirations of its clients, believing that trained organizations are up to 80% faster to adopt cloud. Nordcloud has a very clear vision of how its capabilities fall into common, modernization and cloud-native innovation tracks, thus making it easy for customers to navigate its offering. 
• Cost savings: Nordcloud recognizes that clients need help to scale cloud COEs and manage costs across multiple cloud environments. To achieve this, it offers a portfolio of SaaS-based tools, services and FinOps as a service. Nordcloud’s automation has delivered demonstrable savings to clients, reducing cloud capacity costs by 25% and reducing the costs of VM creation.
• Co-creation approach to deals: Nordcloud achieves a very strong win rate thanks to an agile “swarming” business approach to sales engagements that brings in key experts to translate client needs into sales proposals. About 45% of Nordcloud’s deals come from MSEs, and it aims to capitalize on this with a range of packaged offerings and low entry points for client adoption.

Cautions

• Disruptions taking place: The acquisition of Nordcloud by IBM has the potential to cause strategic changes in the Nordcloud business. Nordcloud is evolving its approach for multicloud management, and clients should be prepared for changes to the operational portfolio as it matures its approach in this area.
• Client engagement required: Nordcloud places heavy emphasis on customer self- enablement through training and knowledge transfer and works most effectively with clients who are willing and able to develop their own internal cloud capabilities. Clients who want a full off-the-shelf service with limited internal capabilities may find that it is not a good fit.
• Limited geographic reach: Nordcloud currently earns almost all its revenue from Europe, with a small presence in APAC. Clients in North America and Latin America may find that it is not a good fit for a close relationship. However, as Nordcloud becomes integrated with IBM, its reach may expand to provide more global coverage.

What it means to work with a company recognised as a Visionary

We believe it means having a partner who thinks broadly and strategically about your cloud journey – and how to balance quick wins with sustainable value.

For example, we recently developed a creative and aggressive commercial set-up for an organisation driving transformation across Azure, AWS and Google Cloud (a set-up never done in that country before). We also beat out some big GSIs on a major tender because of the clever way we’re helping them go cloud native and speed up time-to-value. 

In fact, there’s so much cool stuff happening with Nordcloud customers now – from zero upfront cost migrations and modernisations to DevOps, CCoE optimisation and FinOps – that you could truly say we’re driving a new vision of cloud enablement.

It’s why CRU's analytics director commented on our ability to deliver a completeness of vision, saying: ‘The word transformational is often used, but in my experience rarely delivered. Nordcloud delivered a transformational service.’ And it’s why Finnair’s CDO said we helped put them ‘in a strong position to evolve our technology stack in line with our transformation plan.’ 

If you’d like to inject a bit more vision into your cloud transformation, you know where we are.

Future analyst reporting

Despite Gartner’s caution above about potential disruption from IBM’s acquisition of Nordcloud - it has been seamless. In fact, we regularly work together to help customers benefit from cutting-edge Nordcloud cloud-natives alongside IBM’s scale.

Here’s a recent example – about how an integrated IBM/Nordcloud team is helping lay strategic foundations for scaling cloud across the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). Read the full case study here, which explains how we supported NHS England’s Cloud Centre of Excellence team to:

• Develop a cloud strategy
• Define a roadmap of cloud services and related capabilities to make available to NHS organisations
• Build and launch the CCoE offering as a baseline of support to digital teams across the NHS
• Create a common framework for assessing workload/application suitability for migration and determining the best migration approach
• Enhancing the cloud platforms supporting the NHS IT estate

Going forward, Nordcloud is being incorporated into analyst coverage of IBM. So keep an eye out for how our ninjas are supporting major cloud transformation projects across Europe.