Skytap

Strengths: Skytap makes it easy to create sandboxes that accurately replicate enterprise environments, facilitating development, demos and training while production workloads remain on-premises.

Infrastructure resources and configurations, with the software running on the VM, are composed into "environments" that can easily be snapshotted, cloned and shared for collaborative purposes.

Cautions: Skytap only recently started hosting production applications, and those are primarily traditional applications, not ones that are cloud-native.

The small startup may have trouble expanding beyond its niche, according to Gartner.

And while the partnership with IBM is useful to extend sales, it gives IBM a lot of influence over the company's future.

Gartner notes Skytap could be targeted for acquisition.