Red Hat Named a Leader in 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Container Management

This week we announced that for the second consecutive year, Red Hat has been named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Container Management. This year, Red Hat was positioned furthest on the Completeness of Vision axis.¹ We’re proud of this recognition and believe it is a great validation of Red Hat OpenShift as a comprehensive platform for developing, modernizing and deploying applications at scale, including AI-enabled apps. It provides a consistent experience across hybrid environments -- from the datacenter, to the cloud, to the edge.

This announcement comes on the heels of Red Hat being recognized as a Challenger in the 2024 Magic Quadrant for DevOps Platforms.² As one of only 3 vendors named in both Magic Quadrants, we believe this showcases Red Hat OpenShift not only as a container management platform, but as a complete application development platform with fully integrated DevSecOps tools to support better development practices and bring virtualized and cloud-native applications to market faster. 

To help further explain the result of the Gartner Magic Quadrant from our point of view, we’re answering some of the most frequently asked questions.

What is the Gartner Magic Quadrant?
Magic Quadrants reports are a culmination of rigorous, fact-based research in specific markets, providing a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the providers in markets where growth is high and provider differentiation is distinct. Providers are positioned into four quadrants: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players. The research enables you to get the most from market analysis in alignment with your unique business and technology needs.

How was the Magic Quadrant judged? What criteria were used?
Gartner defines container management as: offerings that enable the deployment and operation of containerized workloads. Delivery methods include cloud, managed service and software for containers running on premises, in the public cloud and/or at the edge. Associated technologies include orchestration and scheduling, service discovery and registration, image registry, routing and networking, service catalog and management user interface and API.

Container management automates the provisioning, operation and lifecycle management of container images at scale. Centralized governance and security policies are used to manage container instances and associated resources. Container management supports the requirements of modern applications including platform engineering, cloud management and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. Benefits include improved agility, elasticity and access to innovation.

According to Gartner, the Gartner Container Management capabilities inclusion criteria are:

• Container Infrastructure – Provides enterprise-grade management of containers across on-premises, cloud and edge locations. Provides tools for integrated fleet management, including lifecycles and configurations for large numbers of container clusters potentially sourced from multiple providers.
• Managed Provisioning and Updates – Automates provisioning and update of container management functions and infrastructure.
• Platform Engineering Support – Provides functions needed to deliver a self-service container platform using product management practices.
• Application Platform Capabilities – Provides application development and DevOps capabilities to accelerate delivery of applications using containers

Why is this significant to us?
According to Gartner, Leaders execute well against their current vision and are well positioned for tomorrow. We believe Gartner is one of the most recognized technology analyst firms in the IT space and having been recognized as aLeader as well as Furthest in Vision validates not only the current capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift, but also Red Hat’s vision for evolving the solution to best meet the needs of our customers in the future.

Learn more about Red Hat OpenShift for Container Management
A full copy of the Gartner Magic Quadrant on Container Management can be downloaded here.

Gartner disclaimer:
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Red Hat.

¹Source: Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Container Management,” September 9 2023

²  Source: Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for DevOps Platforms,” September 2024