Gartner: Vendors hype cloud revenue to impress Wall Street

Vendors in the cloud computing market hype up the revenues they earn from this emerging technology, making it difficult for customers to truly judge the strength of a vendor’s financial health and difficult to make comparisons between vendors, a report from Gartner finds.

Analysts David Mitchell Smith and Ed Anderson say opaque reporting by vendors means customers should evaluate providers not based on earnings but on which offering best matches their use case.

“Assessing vendor cloud revenue claims has become more challenging, with many vendors' IT-related businesses being complicated and nuanced,” Gartner’s Smith and Anderson write in the report, which was issued in late December. “We recommend CIOs direct their organizations to never take vendor cloud revenue at face value, and evaluate vendors on their strategy and service mix.”

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