Amazon Web Services Inc. remains the “commanding” leader in cloud computing over No. 2 Microsoft Corp. and No. 3 Google LLC, but Google and “niche” providers Oracle Corp. and Alibaba Group Ltd. are coming on strong.

That’s according to a new report from Gartner Inc., its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services report, made available on its site this week.

Rounding out the niche category with Alibaba and Oracle are IBM Corp. and Tencent Holdings, with no new entrants in any of the categories and empty quadrants for “challengers” and “visionaries.” This report for the first time combines into the overall cloud market both basic infrastructure as a service offerings such as compute and storage and platform-as-a-service offerings such as cloud databases and “serverless” computing services provided on an as-needed basis.

Overall, Gartner analyst Raj Bala, one of the report’s co-authors, told SiliconANGLE in an interview, AWS remains the clear leader especially in market share. But the market is tightening as Google, Oracle and Alibaba all are accelerating their product capabilities. “Oracle, Google and Alibaba have really stepped on the gas in the past year in terms of capabilities,” he said.

Gartner gives each provider three strengths and three cautions. Notable and perhaps most surprising are cautions Gartner issued for Microsoft’s Azure cloud, which has been winning a number of high-profile deals. They include the still-disputed $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract with the Department of Defense, which AWS is contesting.

For one, Gartner said, Azure has the lowest ratio of availability zones to overall regions of any provider in the Magic Quadrant and a “limited” set of services to support those availability zones. “As a result, Gartner continues to have concerns related to the overall architecture and implementation of Azure, despite resilience-focused engineering efforts and improved service availability metrics during the past year,” said the report, authored by Bala with fellow analysts Bob Gill, Dennis Smith, David Wright and Kevin Ji.

“It’s a big difference between some of the providers in this space,” added Bala, who noted that Microsoft uses an older approach using two local sites paired for disaster recover rather than the “modern” one using availability zones. “They are slowly going toward that model but it has been slow.”

Another caution is that Microsoft doesn’t provide “any form” of guaranteed capacity, which resulted in COVID-19-related capacity shortfalls in several European regions, meaning some customers couldn’t provision already reserved cloud instances or capacity they had paid for.

Third, Gartner said Microsoft’s support can be “very expensive,” especially for customers who haven’t had support services before.

All that said, Gartner praised Azure’s “complete end-to-end set of solutions related to a broad range of workloads and applications,” its “concerted” effort to serve software developers better and its advantages for enterprises that are already Microsoft shops.

AWS’ advantages came as little surprise: its “commanding lead” in market share and product capabilities both in infrastructure as a service and database platform as a service, its ability to design everything from chips to a full software stack and the fact that its business is “exceedingly well-run” with profits that contribute to Amazon overall in a way other cloud providers’ operations still don’t.

That said, AWS also comes in for some criticism, most of it fairly well-known. For one, Gartner said, its very size and reach worries some customers and partners and could alienate software developers, especially since what Gartner notes that AWS benefits from open-source software more than it contributes back.

Moreover, Gartner called out AWS’ “poor cohesion” across its massive array of services, including inconsistencies among products and a tendency to demand an “application builder’s mindset” that can be “daunting” to enterprises. “It certainly is front and center when I use an API for an AWS service that one is radically different from another service’s,” Bala said. “Ultimately it’s a minor bump — it hasn’t stopped their ascent.”

Finally, Gartner said price declines that AWS routinely boasts about are not across the board, especially for its compute service.

Rounding out the leaders, Google Cloud was praised for its open-source contributions such as Kubernetes and TensorFlow, its rising market share and gains in capabilities versus Azure, and its big-data, data science and hybrid and multicloud capabilities such as Anthos. “On the product execution perspective, they have no problem,” he said.

But Google came in for significant cautions as well. For one, Gartner said some of its own clients still aren’t sure about the company’s commitment to enterprise clients and its “slowness in executing on some highly touted partnerships.”

“They still have some struggles in the enterprise and with being thought of as a legitimate supplier of enterprise IT,” Bala said. Applications giant SAP SE chose Azure as its default provider, he noted, and Google still has no support for Oracle.

In addition, cloud revenue remains such a small portion of revenue that its importance to the overall business “is not as clear as its competitors.” Finally, despite Google’s vaunted infrastructure, its cloud has had a number of outages in the past year, with “devastating impact on customers.”

Although the rest of the players have some strengths as well, their disadvantages push them into the niche category. Oracle lately has upped its worldwide presence with more regions and its Cloud@Customer on-premises offering is getting some attention, Gartner said. But its low market share especially in cloud database PaaS is a concern given its vast presence in database software, and it retains some negative perceptions of its cloud capabilities, not always justified, Gartner added.

As for IBM, Gartner said it has some strengths in its Power Systems family of computers available as a service, and its services operation provides a ready-made sales channel. But its platform is complex because of its many acquisitions and “uneven” product development and its market share in application PaaS is negligible worldwide, Gartner noted.

Alibaba is still focused largely on China, and its international offerings don’t measure up to the rest, Gartner noted. Meanwhile, China-based Tencent also has little presence outside China and limited ability to innovate, according to Gartner’s research.

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