Spring is here and ’tis the season for research firm Gartner to publish its annual Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Magic Quadrant. This year’s grid came out last month, but still I thought I’d contribute a few points that I found interesting, following up on my previous post.
- The big three: no, I’m not referring to Lebron-Kyrie-Kevin. AWS continues to sit alone astride the top-right corner, no major surprise there; Microsoft Azure seems to be closing the gap ever so slowly, and Google Cloud Platform is edging closer to the top-right quadrant. This supports the current thinking in the market that the public cloud is essentially a three-horse race
- The IT titans: IBM (IaaS based on Softlayer) and VMware are making steady progress, based on their strategic operational, technology and brand assets, and strengths in the private/hybrid cloud space; interestingly, per Gartner, Hewlett Packard Enterprise has all but exited the market
- The new entrants: UK-based Interoute is making an entrance as a niche player, probably on the back of their latest renewed credit line and ownership of all that fiber as a layer on which to build great things; NTT Com joins Fujitsu as a second Japanese player in the quadrant
- The dark horse: I find it still surprising, again despite the stated target audience, that Digital Ocean is absent as a key niche player. Even if they’re addressing a different customer now, with state-of-the-art infrastructure and financial backing from the likes of a16z, they could become enterprise contenders if they wanted to, with less effort than most other players
- The elephants in the room: as in previous years, Gartner keeps ignoring BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent). Even if the target audience is western CIOs, that could prove to be short-sighted, as most major Asian players have robust global strategies
- Ubuntu partners: nine of the 15 providers listed are part of our Ubuntu Certified Public Cloud program, which brings the best of the world’s number 1 cloud OS to users of our partner clouds. If you’re running a public or v-private cloud, join us – you’ll be in great company!
Check out the report here: http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-2G2O5FC&ct=150519&st=sb