IBM and Oracle face criticism while Alibaba appears as a potential alternative to cloud providers on the hyper-scale.
Cloud marketers often speak a good game about being the "market leader," but with the often murky financial reports that make it difficult to determine who is really dominant, many are left guessing.
Fortunately, Garner has released its latest Magic Quadrant for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Amazon Web Services comes out very well.
For many, it will not be a big surprise to see AWS sitting firmly in the upper right corner of the quadrant with Microsoft behind. What may be a surprise is that these are the only two who sat in that quadrant, with Google well on pace and IBM and Oracle sat in the visionaries section.
All big companies talk about a good game when it comes to being a 'leader' of the cloud, but few are. Oracle's cloud is termed a "viable minimum product" that offers only the most vital storage capacities, capacities, and IaaS networks that "have a limited operating history."
The analyst firm said: "Customers need to have a very high tolerance for risk, coupled with strong technical insight. However, sales and Oracle field executives aggressively promote the Gen 2 offering.
"Customers should be wary of high-pressure sales tactics, understand the reality behind marketing and do not feel compelled to evaluate the offer at this stage of their maturity." Gartner encourages potential customers to speak with referrals.
However, in the Big 2 Gen 2 offering, Gartner said, "Oracle intends this platform to be the basis of their future PaaS and SaaS offerings. It is being built by a highly experienced engineering team recruited primarily from cloud providers. It has a well-designed hyper-scale cloud architecture and a thoughtful selection of current and future features. "
At IBM Gartner he said that the feature set of the SoftLayer infrastructure had not improved significantly since it was acquired in mid-2013. "It's SMB-centric, hosting-oriented and lacks many IaaS capabilities of the cloud by the midmarket and Customers of the company.
"The IBM Cloud experience is currently disarticulated. Some computing capabilities, such as the IBM Bluemix Container Service and OpenWhisk, reside in Bluemix, but Bluemix is hosted in only three SoftLayer data centers and is therefore not local to most The SoftLayer infrastructure, "Gartner said.
Not all of the negative aspects of the Gartner report, however, with Alibaba appears as a visionary. The Alibaba Group subsidiary is reported to be the builder of an impressive ecosystem in China, while its current offerings are described as demonstrating "the supplier's potential to become an alternative to global hyperscale cloud providers in select regions over time ".
However, its international offering is said to offer little in the way of a unique differentiation with other suppliers and hypersalto, "the vision of Alibaba Cloud seems inextricably linked to that of its global competitors, It requires the liberal inspiration of competitors to Develop service and branding capabilities. "
The everlasting challenges of Google and Microsoft come by mixed reviews from Gartner, with Google noting by increasingly being an "open" provider that emphasizes portability, but is often chosen as a secondary provider rather than a strategic one, GCP is increasingly chosen as a strategic alternative to AWS by customers whose businesses compete with Amazon.
Gartner warns that Google still needs to invest heavily in global expansion as GCP has data centers in just five countries, although it plans to enter eight more countries this year.
Microsoft's revenue throughput for the end of 2016 is estimated at around $ 3bn and is labeled as a "very capable and broad platform" and the Azure platform is having innovative added features that are not being copied from competitors.
However, customers cite issues with technical support, documentation, training and breadth of the ISV partner ecosystem. Although the company is making significant improvements in this area, "the unorganized, untapped ecosystem of managed and professional service partners makes it a challenge for customers to gain experience and mitigate risks, resulting in greater reluctance to deploy applications Of production or carry out migrations of data centers ".
Microsoft also has problems with several generations of solutions and unclear guidance on when to use each, which creates a "significant" complexity in determining the correct implementation.
The clear leader in the market, AWS, is reported as ending 2016 with a revenue rate of more than $ 14bn, described as the "thought leader and benchmark for all competitors." Cloud offers are most commonly chosen for strategic adoption, with many business customers now spending more than $ 5m a year, and a few spend more than $ 100m.
Gartner said, "AWS has the broadest ecosystem of ISA's from cloud vendors in IaaS, ensuring that customers can get support and licenses for most commercial programs as well as get pre-integrated software and SaaS solutions with AWS ".
Not all positives, however, with the signing of analysts pointing to a need for experience to implement AWS due to its extensive portfolio, although this problem is somewhat mitigated by "AWS excellent enterprise-class technical support, accurate documentation, extensive training And certification. " Despite this, and being easy to get started, Gartner warns that optimal use can be a challenge for those with a lot of experience.
As for prices, Gartner said that while AWS is perceived as a cost leader and a key benchmark for pricing in the market, "it is not willing to be the best bidder in a competitive situation" and the structure Granular pricing is described as complex.
