IBM has long touted the benefits of its cloud platform, and now market watchers are beginning to cut it some slack, noting the breadth of its cloud offerings.

IBM has just been named as the second leading infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider behind Amazon Web Services (AWS) by International Data Corp. (IDC). IDC’s Worldwide Semi-Annual Public Cloud Services Tracker, 2H 2015 said IBM is the second-best provider of IaaS capabilities such as provisioning of servers, storage and networking.

That’s because IBM offers IaaS services alongside a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and also various Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) options. In addition, IBM’s cloud provides a constantly growing set of services that support analytics, cognitive computing, Internet of Things, mobile, networking and storage, backed by 47 global cloud data centers.

“We’re glad to see IDC recognize the momentum IBM Cloud is making as our investments in data center expansion continue to pay off,” said Jim Comfort, CTO for IBM Cloud, in a statement.

According to Comfort, IBM is seeing massive customer uptake for all of its IaaS capabilities, with customers using its cloud to build public, private and hybrid cloud environments.

“It all comes down to enabling choice and providing the right mix of services,” Comfort said.

As well as IDC, another analyst firm has also recognized IBM’s progress. Just over a week ago, IBM was named as a leader in public cloud IaaS adoption by Technology Business Research (TBR) in its semi-annual Public Cloud Customer Research survey of some 2,169 enterprises. In that report, respondents cited IBM for its ability to provide hybrid management tools while also addressing data location and privacy concerns with its wide network of data centers.

TBR survey respondents also cited IBM’s focus on developers, and its ability to deliver professional and managed services.

“We continue to see strong enterprise adoption of public cloud services being driven by the need for hybrid management tools and solutions,” said Kelsey Mason, an analyst at TBR, in a statement. “The market is also consolidating, which leaves very few players remaining that can address customer demands around global reach and scale, as well as data security and compliance.”

These reports suggest that a resurgence for IBM Cloud is on the cards. IBM is rarely ranked as a “leader” in the cloud, with AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform typically listed as the “top three” cloud providers. However, the status quo could be changing, as IBM was recently named as a leader in hybrid cloud management solutions by two other research firms, Forrester Research Inc., and Synergy Research.

“Technology and business innovators, almost daily, are creating new ways to deliver the benefits of cloud services to the market and so the territory steadily expands and definitional boundaries are repeatedly tested and sometimes shift,” said IDC chief analyst Frank Gens in the latest report.

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