Last week Gartner updated its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for the year 2016. The Magic Quadrant for the year 2015 was released in May last year just like in 2014 (covered by cloudcomputing.info) while the Magic Quadrant for 2013 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.
No big surprises here: Amazon Web Services still leads the pack followed by Microsoft Azure and its unbelievable ramp-up.
While everybody else remains in the “niche players” area, due to specific relationships with customers or the capability to answer specific demands from them, Google Compute move to “visionaries” probably due to a lower adoption compared to the expectations.
In the context of this Magic Quadrant, cloud compute IaaS (hereafter referred to simply as “cloud IaaS” or “IaaS”) is defined 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. The resources are scalable and elastic in near real time, and metered by use. Self-service interfaces are exposed directly to the customer, including a web-based UI and an API. The resources may be single-tenant or multitenant, and hosted by the service provider or on-premises in the customer’s data center.