Thoughts on Gartner's latest Iaas Magic Quadrant
Posted on 5 June, 2015, on LinkedIn.
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