Containers to capture 15% of all enterprise apps across 75% of business by 2024

Analyst firm Gartner has completed its first forecast for container management software and services, finding that while adoption will be rapid the technology won't be a big money-spinner for software vendors. In a new document, titled Forecast Analysis: Container Management (Software and Services) Worldwide, announced today, …

[amanfromMars 1]

Surely they can do better? Try harder going deeper may help.

But the real money is in services and IaaS, not software, says Gartner’s first lash at container futures.

Does Gartner not realise the real money is in understanding the one is the other .... with software servering and servicing IaaS as an homogeneous package ..... a sealed container of vital goods?

And clearly, by reason of the tales told here in the Registered piece, they do not, which when true renders their predictions no better than inane waffle akin to self-serving twaddle.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have grown up with Gartner being constantly wrong. 20 years now and counting.

Previously predicted WIndows phone would surpass iPhone by 2015, original link strangely missing!

https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/gartner_also_predicts_that_windows_phone_will_pass_iphone

[RM Myers]

Being older, I can assure you that Gartner has been constantly wrong for more than 20 years. Their predictions are useful however - if Gartner says a technology is the path to take, you can at least eliminate one path from consideration.

[BigAndos]

Gartner astonish me. They are no better than anyone vaguely technically savvy at predicting the future of IT and yet somehow lots of senior IT leaders still "manage by Gartner" and base a lot of their purchasing decisions on the "magic" quadrant.

[hoola]

And pay subscriptions to do so.

I have lost count of the number of times management have had their calls with Gartner to decide on technology recommendations from the techies doing the work.

[Erik4872]

Magic Quadramt Strikes Again!

Gartner is the 2010s/2020s version of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM." Some of their "predictions" are paid for, and therefore are kind of made to happen. You can bet if there's some whizzy new Container As A Service tool in the Magic Quadrant, a good chunk of CIOs will buy it, use it and make the prediction come true.

They definitely have the "market to lazy business people" thing down...they hold themselves out as a bunch of thought leaders, thinkfluencers, whatever. Reality is that their "research" is just a bunch of copy-paste reports put together by a bunch of new grads who couldn't quite make it into McKinsey or one of the other management consultancues when they were done with school. Our company bought access to their whole research library for a year, and I never found anything worth the cost.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was once involved with this sort of thing

Our product was evaluated by Forrester and Gartner. Forrester had a detailed list of questions, they went through on screenshare timing how long it took to perform certain standard tasks for that type of product, and how many clicks, etc. They'd get us to do it again if they weren't happy.

Gartner just said, "we can evaluate your product based on your company's overall position in the market." This was a company with 20--30 different products.

Couldn't believe the difference. Not happy that they're a source of news for El Reg.

[Zed Zee]

Having said that...

...despite what Gartner or any other market analysis stats thrower might say, IT is moving towards containers, rather than staying with virtual machines. Anyone trying to fight this is burying their head in the sand and will ultimately become a hindrance in their IT team, if they continue to resist change and refuse to engage on this new technology, while clinging onto their beloved Windows Server, Cisco Networking and VMware vSphere certifications.

Having more than 30+ years of IT industry experience (and having done it all from mainframes, to server consolidation, to now cloud), I can guarantee you that workloads are mostly going to the public cloud. Believe me, I, too, fought against Open Source Software and Public Cloud - I lost.

Never mind all the BS about hybrid and private - multicloud is where they will be - not 100% (some will still run on mainframes in some co-lo somewhere) but enterprises are looking to get rid of their DCs, as the leases come up for renewal. This is what drives most Digital Transformation and DC Migration projects.

The revolution (and it is this time a revolution, rather than an evolution as was with VMs) is not only happening at the Compute Primitive level (Containers) but also at the application level (Microservices), which in turn is driving new ways of hosting (Public Cloud), hosting (Containers and Orchestration), provisioning (Automation and Configuration Management), managing (Observability and AIOps) and development (DevOps and DevSecOps), etc.

This revolution is happening right now and will continue to grow in the future, whether you like it or not. Will it be as fast as Gartner predicts? Maybe. But they don't call it Agile for no good reason.