AWS blazes ahead in cloud IaaS, but Microsoft’s catching up
Amazon’s cloud dominance has been recognized by analyst kings Gartner in a new “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service” report, which was published late yesterday.
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report offers a detailed look at the marketplace, and goes some way towards driving buyer’s behavior. After all, no enterprise wants to hedge its bets with a cloud provided that’s deemed to be a part of the chasing pack. The report ranks vendors according to two factors – “completeness of vision” (x axis) and “ability to execute” (y axis). The goal of any company is to be as far up and to the right on the graph as possible and to avoid the depths of the lower left. Meanwhile, it penalizes those who’re delivering today’s needs without focusing on the future as much as it does those who’re all talk and no action.
And so to this year’s report, which reveals that Amazon Web Services has maintained its grip on the cloud market, far to the right and near the top of the top right square. That AWS would land up in pole position was never in doubt, but even so it’s domination of the industry is still amazing. In total, Gartner says it’s captured a whopping 83 percent of the cloud computing infrastructure market, which is about as close to total domination as anyone’s ever likely to get.
But the bigger surprise is Microsoft Azure’s performance. While it’s still way, way behind AWS it’s also opened up a decent lead on the other players, well ahead of last year’s second place CSC, and eternal rival Google. That’s not to say Google hasn’t improved – it has – rising up to third place in the Quadrant on the back of a range of new cloud services designed to match those of AWS and Microsoft.
In the middle of Gartner’s graph sit wannabee contenders like CSC, CenturyLink, IBM, Rackspace, Terremark, VMware and Virtustream. Bringing up the rear are the likes of Joyent, Dimension Data, Fujitsu and HP, with GoGrid ranked in dead last. HP will certainly be very disappointed with its low ranking, having recently committed $1 billion to boost its cloud efforts.
AWS under threat?
Interestingly though, Gartner warns that the picture may not always be so one-sided. “AWS is beginning to face significant competition – from Microsoft in the traditional business market, and from Google in the cloud-native market,” it says.
The report adds that while AWS has responded aggressively to price drops from competitors on commodity resources, it’s failing to commodity-price services where it possesses superior capabilities. “AWS currently has a multiyear competitive advantage, but is no longer the only fast-moving, innovative, global-class provider in the market,” Gartner concludes.
In other words, Gartner seems to think the chasing pack will continue to close the gap on AWS over time, especially if they keep applying pressure by adding new capabilities and slashing their prices.
photo credit: SkipSteuart via photopin cc
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