It seems that research giant Gartner (IT) has snapped up CloudHarmony, a company that offered independent cloud assessment and benchmarking. As of early this year, the company said it tracked some 30 cloud providers, from Amazon (AMZN) Web Services to Zettagrid, an Australian cloud computing company.
A blurb on the deal was posted to CloudHarmony’s web site, with a pointer to a blog that does not yet exist. Gartner does not list CloudHarmony on its acquisitions page.
But, the LinkedIn profile of Jason Read, founder of six-year-old CloudHarmony, lists him as a Gartner vice president of research as of June 2015. So something happened, it’s just not clear if this was an “acqui-hire” of Read and some other people or a full-on company acquisition.
Gartner has a big cloud computing research practice; Lydia Leong, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner is widely respected. So perhaps Gartner is bringing in new resources for that. Fortune reached out to Gartner and Read for comment and will update this as story as needed.
CloudHarmony positioned itself as an impartial observer and measurer of cloud services. According to its web site, “it is not affiliated with or owned by any cloud provider.” Early this year it published a cloud reliability survey on the three major public clouds.
So if a big company was weighing a move of a certain type of application to a cloud and wanted to know whether Amazon, Microsoft(MSFT), Google(GOOG) or another contender was best for that case, CloudHarmony could be a resource. As would Gartner.
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