The Fourth Cloud Vendor Map Is Live
The CTO Advisor, Wednesday, June 10th, 2026
Keith Townsend launches a vendor map scoring on-prem control-plane platforms against the Fourth Cloud operating model.
The CTO Advisor's new Fourth Cloud Vendor Map scores VMware Cloud Foundation, Red Hat OpenShift, Nutanix Cloud Platform, and Oxide Computer against the Fourth Cloud operating model. It is explicitly not a magic quadrant or ranking.
Each platform is evaluated on two independent axes: capability on a 0-4 gradient with AWS as the benchmark, and the Decision Authority Placement Model (DAPM). The piece argues the question that matters now is not whether an enterprise has infrastructure, but whether it has a control model. An interactive version of the map is available alongside the analysis.