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back to article Public cloud? Two vendors float on high, says Gartner

Gartner’s latest report on Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) places just two vendors in the coveted top right “Leaders” segment of its “Magic Quadrant” chart. The research and analyst firm presented the report at its Infrastructure, Operations and Data Center Summit in Sydney yesterday. Those two are Amazon Web …

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  1. thames

    Report says AWS 10 times the size of all others put together

    AWS (...) has “over 10 times more cloud IaaS compute capacity in use than the aggregate total of the other 14 providers in this Magic Quadrant”.

    When one party is 10 times the size of everyone else put together, there is no "number 2". There's just a market leader and a more or less equal collection of also-rans.

    As for the credibility of Gartner's predictions of what will happen, this is the same company that in 2011 predicted that Windows Phone would overtake the iPhone in global market share in 2015. Meanwhile here on planet earth Microsoft's market share actually fell in that time and Apple shows no sign of being relegated to number 3.

    AWS dominates the cloud. Android and Apple dominate the mobile phone market. Yes there are other companies, and they may have nice stuff, but Microsoft's market share is much closer to IBM's (Softlayer) or Blackberry's than it is to the market leaders.

    Look, I'm a big fan of Linux, but I don't go around touting reports ("magic" or not) that show that Ubuntu is the number 2 OS shipped on Dell laptops and then claim that makes it equivalent to Windows in desktop market share. But that's exactly what Gartner and the other PR houses are doing with MS Azure and Windows Phone.

    Let's look at the actual numbers here, and the numbers say that Amazon's market share is so far ahead of everyone else's that any of the also-rans can really be considered to be niche players. The question for customer then is simply whether or not that niche fits your needs better than AWS.

    11 3 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Update FAIL (?)

      It's not correct to take that number on it's own as being an overall indication of relative size. Microsoft have vast deployments of PaaS and SaaS for instance - and as per recent quarterly results are actually way in front of AWS in terms of total cloud revenue.

      1 0 Reply
    2. h4rm0ny
      Reply Icon

      Re: Report says AWS 10 times the size of all others put together

      >>"When one party is 10 times the size of everyone else put together, there is no "number 2". There's just a market leader and a more or less equal collection of also-rans."

      I would say when the market is worth two-hundred billion and growing rapidly, I would say number 2 position is a pretty awesome place to be. ;)

      Besides, the Gartner Magic Quadrant isn't really a leaderboard where people come first, second, third, etc. A company could be far bigger than its nearest rivals in terms of revenue but be in the upper left rather than the upper right. The difference is significant because the report is not only a summary of where vendors are, but on where they are going. Anything in the upper right, Gartner are predicting good things.

      Both AWS and Azure cover a lot of different services and features. Given that both companies are well-established and not going away, then decision as to which must be based on suitability and quality of the services rather than market position. AWS has come from a position of IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) and spread a little into PaaS (Platform as a Service), whereas Azure has targeted PaaS aggressively from the start. To me, this is more interesting because I see PaaS as far more the future than IaaS. I want to offload as much maintenance and administration as possible. I also find Azure has better management tools, though it depends what your use case is, of course.

      Anyway, what I'm saying is that #1, #2 - these things matter only to the shareholders and the fan-people. To the customer, it makes no difference at all, save that underdogs will price more competitively long-term.

      4 0 Reply
  2. Roland6 Silver badge

    The 2015 magic quadrant can be found here: http://cloudcomputing.info/en/news/2015/05/gartner-releases-its-magic-quadrant-for-cloud-infrastructure-as-a-service-for-2015.html

    As can the quadrants for 2013 & 2014.

    To see the report currently you need to sign into Gartner...

    What is interesting is seeing, what is effectively an off-shoot from an IT user organisation, being so far ahead of IT supplier organisations in the provision of IT cloud services.

    2 0 Reply

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