Gartner this week updated its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for the year 2015. The Magic Qudrant for 2014 was released in May last year (covered by cloudcomputing.info) and the Magic Quadrant for 2013, which was released in August 2013 (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.
This years Quadrant, as analyzed by Lydia Leong, Douglas Toombs, Bob Gill has the following summary:
The market for cloud IaaS is in a state of upheaval, as many service providers are shifting their strategies after failing to gain enough market traction. Customers must exercise caution when choosing providers.
This Magic Quadrant covers all the common use cases for cloud IaaS, including development and testing, production environments (including those supporting mission-critical workloads) for both internal and customer-facing applications, batch computing (including high-performance computing [HPC]) and disaster recovery. It encompasses both single-application workloads and “virtual data centers” (VDCs) hosting many diverse workloads. It includes suitability for a wide range of application design patterns, including both “cloud-native” application architectures and enterprise application architectures.
For 2015 the Quadrant is updated as as followed:
The Qudrants from 2014 and 2013 were:
The evaluation criteria which Gartner uses in order to determine where a solution/vendor will reside in the Quadrant are described by the ability to execute, versus the completeness of vision.
Ability to execute:
- Product/Service
- Overall Viability
- Sales Execution/Pricing
- Market Responsiveness/Record
- Marketing Execution
- Customer Experience
- Operations
Completeness of vision:
- Market Understanding
- Marketing Strategy
- Sales Strategy
- Offering (Product) Strategy
- Business Model
- Vertical/Industry Strategy
- Innovation
- Geographic Strategy
From a completeness of vision point of view Microsoft, with its Azure solution is almost on par with Amazon Web Services, which is still the leader in terms of vision and ability to execute. Only Microsoft and Amazon are in the Leaders Quadrant.
Notable Vendors ( customers that are successfully using their products and services) are:
- Amazon Web Services
- Carpathia
- Microsoft
- Verizon
- Virtustream