Research firm Gartner this week updated its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for the year 2014. The Magic Quadrant for 2013, was released in August last year as covered by cloudcomputing.info. The Magic Quadrant aims to provide a qualitative analysis into a market and its direction, maturity and participants. The report details for each company in the Quadrant its Strengths and Cautions.
Gartner defines Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) as a standardized, highly automated offering, where compute resources, complemented by storage and networking capabilities, are owned by a service provider and offered to the customer on demand.
When comparing the Quadrant of this year, to the Quadrant of August last year some we can notice that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is still the leader when it comes to completeness of vision and ability to execute and is therefore positioned into the leaders quadrant. Microsoft, which was positioned in the Visionaries quadrant last year, now is also part of the leaders quadrant.
Its also remarkable to notice that compared to last year no vendor is in the challengers quadrant anymore, leaving the rest of the vendors either in the niche players quadrant (Rackspace, Virtustream, VMware, Fujitsu, HP, Dimension Data, Joyent and GoGrid) or the visionaries quadrant (CenturyLink, CSC, IBM (Softlayer), Verizon Terremark and Google)
For a detailed overview we recommend reading the extensive post which comes with the Magic Quadrant on the website of Gartner.