At AWSinsider, we’re not sure Amazon has to shell out any additional bucks to take its rightful place on the Gartner Magic Quadrant. After all, AWS has ruled the IaaS space for years.
So it is little surprise that this year, once again, AWS ruled the Gartner roost.
In fact, by looking at the chart below, it wasn’t even close.
Gartner IaaS Quadrant
At InsideAWS, we’ve seen more Magic Quadrants than Penn and Teller. But rare is the day we see such a thumping.
Amazon simply walked away this bad boy prize. Simply put, this was a rout.
This is good news for Amazon. But it also serves as inspiration for competitors who over time can disrupt this AWS dominated space.
So let’s look more at what Gartner had to say. First the research house tackled the market aspects. “AWS has a diverse customer base and the broadest range of use cases, including enterprise and mission-critical applications. It is the overwhelming market share leader, with more than five times the cloud IaaS compute capacity in use than the aggregate total of the other 14 providers in this Magic Quadrant,” Gartner noted. It is a thought leader; it is extraordinarily innovative, exceptionally agile, and very responsive to the market. It has the richest array of IaaS features and PaaS-like capabilities, and continues to rapidly expand its service offerings. It is the provider most commonly chosen for strategic adoption.
Gartner also pointed to the range of technology partners whom build tools that add value to AWS. These days there a literally hundreds of such partners.
There are also partners that can help customers get up to speed and then manage the installations once they are up and running.
“AWS has an extensive network of partners that can offer assistance with adopting its platform. It is increasingly targeting mainstream enterprises and the midmarket via go-to-market partnerships with SIs (such as Capgemini, Cognizant and Wipro) that provide application development expertise, managed services and professional services such as data center migration, although such providers do not necessarily deliver solutions that are optimal for the cloud environment,” Gartner explained.
Meanwhile Microsoft, which has always been strong in the partner department, is lagging behind. “Microsoft has just begun to build an ecosystem of partners around Azure Infrastructure Services, and it does not yet have a software licensing marketplace. Furthermore, it has little in the way of enterprise Linux options. Consequently, the offering is currently very Microsoft-centric and appeals primarily to .NET developers, although customers do run heterogeneous environments in Azure,” Gartner concluded.
