Joyent

Strengths: Joyent was always an innovator boasting deep engineering talent. One point of differentiation is its unified approach to VMs and containers.

Because Joyent is strongly committed to open-sourcing its entire stack, "Joyent's innovations have found their way into open-source projects that customers can utilize to deploy on-premises, private cloud instantiations of Joyent's public cloud IaaS offerings," said Gartner.

That's a boon for building hybrid clouds.

Cautions: Joyent hasn't worked much with traditional enterprises -- most customers are startups, tech companies or digital divisions of larger enterprises, according to Gartner. Those customers typically build cloud-native applications, rather than migrating existing applications.

The provider doesn't offer many capabilities, said the research firm, with even basic features like load balancing rely on hosted appliances or container instances.

Samsung's primary objective in acquiring Joyent was to get its own low-cost hybrid cloud platform to power its mobile and IoT businesses.

"Samsung's internal priorities will increasingly drive Joyent's priorities," Gartner noted. Those needs could deviate from external customers.