I recently read Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide” for 2018, which considers the leading cloud IaaS providers’ market positions and evaluates their strengths and weaknesses, and I was tempted to go further back and review what had happened in the Magic Quadrants over the last 5 years. Below is a summary of these reports.

What is Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)?

A cloud IaaS vendor, such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, provides self-service access to programmatically accessible and highly automated infrastructure resources, such as compute servers, storage, and networking. These resources are scalable and elastic on-demand and in near-real-time, and are metered by use.

In IaaS, the provider manages the data center facilities, hardware and virtualization, but everything above the hypervisor layer — the operating system, middle-ware and application — is managed by the customer.

What is Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IaaS?

Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide” reports are a much-awaited market analysis of the profiles of the individual cloud vendors, and of the cloud market overall.

Gartner evaluates the vendors based on ability to execute, which includes the features provided, self-service and automation capabilities, their product road-map and overall strategy, and completeness of vision, which includes the vendors’ understanding of the cloud market, their position in this market, competitive differentiation, value proposition and solution strategy, financial investments in the future of their business, and expansion plans.

With the above criteria measured for every vendor, they are placed into one of four categories, or “quadrants”:

Leaders: Leaders are those who execute well today and are well-positioned for tomorrow. They distinguish themselves by having services suitable for strategic adoption and having an ambitious road-map. They have a track record of successful delivery, significant market share, and many reference-able customers.

Challengers: Challengers execute well today or may dominate a large segment, but do not yet fully understand the market direction. They are well-positioned to serve some current market needs, and have a track record of successful delivery for a particular set of use-cases, but are not adaption quickly enough to market challenges or do not have an ambitious road-map.

Visionaries: Visionaries do not execute well today, but have a strong sense of where the market is headed. They have an ambitious road-map and are making significant investments in technology and their services are still emerging. They may not serve a broad range of use-cases yet.

Niche Players: Niche players focus successfully on small segments and do not outperform others. Niche Players are excellent providers for specific use-cases but do not serve the general market well.

Gartner's Magic Quadrants for Infrastructure-as-a-service.
Enlarge— Gartner's Magic Quadrants for Infrastructure-as-a-service.

I’m going to talk about the IaaS Magic Quadrants for 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 below. Given that Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google eventually dominate the market in 2018, I’m going to summarize their strengths and weaknesses from past reports.

Magic Quadrant for 2014

Gartner's Magic Quadrants for Infrastructure-as-a-service for 2014.
Enlarge— Gartner's Magic Quadrants for Infrastructure-as-a-service for 2014.

The 15 cloud vendors in this Magic Quadrant were evaluated as follows:

Amazon Web Services

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

Microsoft

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

Google

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

Magic Quadrant for 2015

Gartner's Magic Quadrants for Infrastructure-as-a-service for 2015.
Enlarge— Gartner's Magic Quadrants for Infrastructure-as-a-service for 2015.

The 15 cloud vendors in this Magic Quadrant were evaluated as follows:

Amazon Web Services

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

Microsoft

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

Google

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

Vendors changes in 2015 Added: Interoute, NTT Communications. Dropped: GoGrid, HP.

Magic Quadrant for 2016

Gartner's Magic Quadrants for Infrastructure-as-a-service for 2016.
Enlarge— Gartner's Magic Quadrants for Infrastructure-as-a-service for 2016.

The 10 cloud vendors in this Magic Quadrant were evaluated as follows:

Amazon Web Services

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

Microsoft

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

Google

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

Vendors changes in 2016 Added: CSC, Dimension Data, Interoute, Joyent, Verizon

Magic Quadrant for 2017

Gartner's Magic Quadrants for Infrastructure-as-a-service for 2017.
Enlarge— Gartner's Magic Quadrants for Infrastructure-as-a-service for 2017.

The 14 cloud vendors in this Magic Quadrant were evaluated as follows:

Amazon Web Services

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

Microsoft

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

Google

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

Vendors changes in 2017 Added: Alibaba Cloud, Interoute, Joyent, Oracle, Skytap. Dropped: VMware.

Magic Quadrant for 2018

Gartner's Magic Quadrants for Infrastructure-as-a-service for 2018.
Enlarge— Gartner's Magic Quadrants for Infrastructure-as-a-service for 2018.

The 6 cloud vendors in this Magic Quadrant were evaluated as follows:

The global market for cloud IaaS has consolidated around hyperscale service providers. Infrastructure and operations leaders should adopt strategically, but consider scenario-specific providers as well.

Amazon Web Services

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

Microsoft

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

Google

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

Vendors changes in 2018 Dropped: CenturyLink, Interoute, Fujitsu, Joyent, NTT Communications, Rackspace, Skytap, Virtustream.

  1. Customer expectations continued to increase significantly over the course of 2017.
  2. Integrated management capabilities and developer services are key generators of value.
  3. Managing multiple cloud IaaS providers is challenging.
  4. Customers frequently use third-party management tools for governance, especially multi-cloud governance.
  5. Application platform strategy, and the relevant vendor relationships, are important to many customers.
  6. Ecosystems are vital.
  7. Managed and professional services greatly increase the likelihood of a successful cloud IaaS implementation.
  8. “Lift and shift” migrations rarely achieve the desired business outcomes. Although many customers first investigate using IaaS to achieve cost savings, most customers buy IaaS to achieve greater business agility or to access infrastructure capabilities that they do not have within their own data center.
  9. IaaS can drive significant cost savings when customers have short-term, seasonal, disaster recovery or batch-computing needs. It can also be a boon to companies with limited access to capital and to small companies - especially startups - that cannot afford to invest in infrastructure. - 10. Single-tenant options in public cloud IaaS are preferred over hosted private cloud IaaS.
  10. Server-less computing is most easily adopted via public cloud services. The server-less model of computing abstracts the underlying infrastructure and hides many management considerations from the application developer.
  11. Public cloud IaaS providers are beginning to deliver comprehensive solutions for micro-services infrastructure. Micro-services infrastructure is a composite of the various types of application infrastructure technologies used to build, deploy, run and manage micro-services and mini-services.
  12. Customers frequently acknowledge that public cloud IaaS providers offer superior security capabilities when compared to their own data centers.
  13. APIs anchor a partner ecosystem. Programmatic (API) access to infrastructure is crucial, as it enables customers, as well as third parties, to build management tools for their platforms, and to enable applications to take maximum advantage of the infrastructure environment.

What Key Market Aspects Should Buyers Be Aware Of?

  1. The global market remains consolidated around two clear leaders, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.
  2. The remainder of the market is highly fragmented. Despite the thorough dominance of two market leaders, there are still thousands of service providers that offer cloud IaaS.
  3. Chinese cloud providers have gone global, but still have limited success outside of the domestic Chinese market.
  4. Customers normally prefer to keep data in-region for reasons of network latency. However, regulatory concerns that require keeping data in-country, as well as revelations about foreign intelligence agencies obtaining access to private data, have heightened the desire of non-U. S.-based customers to purchase cloud IaaS from local providers.
  5. Cloud IaaS is not a commodity. Providers vary significantly in their features, performance, cost and business terms. Although in theory, cloud IaaS has very little lock-in — a VM is just a VM, in the end — in truth, cloud IaaS is not merely a matter of hardware rental, but an entire data center ecosystem as a service.

Conclusion

The market has become consolidated around two clear leaders, namely Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, with Google steadily catching up. While Amazon Web Services and Microsoft have retained the leadership position over the last 5 years, Google has moved from a Visionary to a Leadership quadrant. These three hyperscale providers will be important in the coming years, as they provide the broadest range of features and the most long-term market leadership. The rest of the market remains highly fragmented and variable, and will need to be considered thoroughly for use-case specific implementations.

Further Reading