Microsoft Azure is hot on Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) heels, ranking just behind the cloud leader and inside the upper-right corner of Gartner Inc.’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Magic Quadrant.

Both Microsoft Azure and AWS are considered as the only “leaders” out of ten top vendors ranked in the Magic Quadrant, which judges them according to their “completeness of vision” and “ability to execute”.

“The market for cloud IaaS has consolidated significantly around two leading service providers,” Gartner said in a statement. “The future of other service providers is increasingly uncertain.”

That last statement will be of particular concern to Google, which has considerably ramped up its cloud efforts in the last year with the appointment of ex-VMware Inc. founder Diane Greene. Indeed, it was less than a year ago that senior vice president of technical infrastructure and Google Fellow Urs Hölzle proclaimed the firm’s cloud business would soon generate revenues in excess of its advertising business, but with Gartner only ranking it a distant third behind the top two, it’s clear the company still has some way to go.

Gartner categorizes Google as a “visionary”, while the remaining seven vendors – CenturyLink Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., IBM, NTT Communications Co. Ltd., Rackspace Inc., Virtustream and VMware – are all labeled as “niche players”.

Amazon Web Services: The safe choice

Gartner says that AWS’s IaaS offering is now so feature-rich and mature that it’s officially the “safe choice”. Not only are AWS’s offerings “many times the aggregate size of all other providers in the market”, but it has a “multi-year” competitive advantage over its rivals too.

Still, Gartner did have some word of criticism for AWS, saying it’s cloud is difficult to use (training is required) and that most companies will have to resort to some kind of professional services contract. AWS’s pricing is also “complex”, and one of its main advantages – that it’s at the cutting edge of developing new features and services – is also a problem for customers, who are often overwhelmed by the choices on offer and don’t know how to best utilize some of its offerings.

Microsoft Azure: Close, but no cigar

Microsoft has poured millions of dollars into building out Azure, but even though it’s rapidly pushing out new features and capabilities it’s still some way behind AWS. Gartner heaped praise on Microsoft for its unique approach of packaging IaaS/app development PaaS in both on and off-premises environments. The company also benefits from its massive legacy install base, which means its platform is “ready-made” for many of its long-standing enterprise customers.

On the downside though, Gartner calls out Azure for still being a work in progress. It says some features aren’t fully developed yet, adding that: “These difficulties are exacerbated by disorganized, incomplete and sometimes out-of-date documentation, as well as a support organization that is not always capable of solving complex implementation challenges, a limited number of Azure experts outside of Microsoft (whether consultants or potential employees) and few options for Azure training.”

Google: Still playing catch up

Google is the sole vendor in the “visionaries” category, offering “a solid and well-implemented core of fundamental IaaS and PaaS capabilities, but its feature set and scope of services are not as broad as that of the market leaders,” Gartner said.

For example, Google Cloud Platform still misses key capabilities such as management tools for large groups of users, networking topologies similar to enterprise data centers, role-based access controls, and a robust ecosystem of third-party apps. Gartner also says Google is still at the “rudimentary stage” when it comes to engaging with enterprise customers, despite the best efforts of new cloud boss Greene.

“We believe that there is still insufficient forward movement in service features, sales, marketing, globalization and partner ecosystem to make Google broadly attractive as a strategic cloud IaaS provider in 2016,” Gartner concluded.

The best of the rest

IBM will likely be even more disappointed than Google, given that it’s been lumbered in the “Niche Players” category. That’s because IBM’s SoftLayer cloud is often talked up as being one of the “big four” vendors alongside AWS, Microsoft and Google. However, Gartner makes clear that it’s not particularly impressed with IBM’s public IaaS cloud strategy, which has seen minimal investment in recent years. Instead, IBM focuses on offering a much broader range of services on its cloud, including IaaS, managed hosting, bare-metal-as-a-service, PaaS Bluemix and various SaaS services. IBM may be right in its belief that the cloud is about much more than just IaaS, but in the eyes of Gartner, it has a long way to go if it’s to catch AWS and Microsoft.

As for the other vendors, CenturyLink, Rackspace and Virtustream all managed to outrank IBM, with Fujitsu, NTT Communications and VMware ranking just below.

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