"EMA Vendors to Watch" are companies that provide unique customer value by solving problems that had previously gone unaddressed. The award recognizes vendors that dare to go off the beaten path and have defined their own market niches.

Inefficient workload placement and a general lack of ongoing infrastructure optimization are the key reasons for organizations not achieving the expected virtualization and cloud ROI. Optimal workload placement depends on multiple factors, such as SLAs, compliance and performance requirements, software licensing cost, application requirements and hardware cost. As none of today's cloud platforms allows customers to dynamically place and rebalance workloads based on these considerations, organizations often turn toward overprovisioning as their "insurance policy." This approach is costly and ineffective, as applications often cannot take advantage of this theoretical headroom.