Amazon Web Services Inc. has retained an impressive lead in Gartner Inc.’s latest Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, with Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. failing to make up much if any ground over their biggest rival.

The picture at the top, according to the ranking released Thursday, is much the same as it was in 2016’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud IaaS, with AWS way out in front of the “Leaders” box, followed by Microsoft Azure as the only other leader, albeit some way behind. Google was ranked as a “visionary” for the second year in a row.

This Magic Quadrant ranks public cloud companies for their infrastructure as a service offerings, the foundation level of cloud computing that includes storage, computing and networking services.

But it doesn’t count platform as a service, which encompasses services for creating and distributing software, or software as a service, meaning applications such as Salesforce.com Inc.’s customer relationship management services. Both are multibillion-dollar markets in their own right. And some cloud providers and analysts believe the categories are becoming less distinct from each other, especially since customers often buy more than one type of service from a single cloud provider.

It’s no surprise that AWS continues to dominate the IaaS scene. The company has held a commanding lead ever since cloud computing became a thing a decade ago, and Gartner noted it’s now the most commonly chosen provider for strategic, organizationwide adoption of cloud infrastructure services.

“It continues to be the thought leader and the reference point for all competitors, with an accelerating pace of innovation on top of an already rich portfolio of services, and an expanding impact across a range of IT [information technology] markets,” Gartner said in its report. On the downside, Gartner cautioned that AWS’s services still require a considerable amount of expertise to get up and running, have a complex pricing structure and are only partly covered by an agreement to guarantee certain service levels.

Microsoft, Google round out top three

Microsoft Azure ranks second primarily thanks to its appeal among its enterprise customers. Those customers tend to gravitate toward Azure primarily so they can extend their existing infrastructure-oriented relationship with Microsoft and their investments in its technologies, Gartner said. They also place a high value on Azure’s ability to integrate with Microsoft’s application development tools, as well as its specialized PaaS capabilities that include Azure Data Lake, Azure Machine Learning and the Azure IoT Suite.

However, Gartner called out Microsoft’s service experience as being “less enterprise-ready than expected.” It pointed to customer issues with technical support, documentation, training and the breadth of its software partner ecosystem as justification for this claim. Gartner said that although Microsoft has been trying to address these concerns, its disorganized ecosystem “makes it challenging for customers to obtain expertise and mitigate risks, resulting in greater reluctance to deploy production applications or conduct data center migrations.”

As for Google Cloud Platform, Gartner says it remains some way behind the top two, though it is still a good option for “cloud-native” companies. The company’s strengths include its innovation engine and focus on portability, and it has also made great strides in its efforts to sell itself to a wider range of enterprise customers. Google also continues to make heavy investments into things like analytics, and Gartner said it believes these will eventually pay off.

Despite all that, GCP is still bereft of a full “ability to execute” on its vision and is often chosen as a secondary platform to AWS, Gartner said. GCP also lacks the same global presence as AWS and Azure with data centers in just five countries, though it plans to enter eight more by the end of 2017.

The best of the rest

The field drops precipitously after those three. IBM Corp. is often cited by the press as being one of four so-called “cloud giants,” but Gartner’s Magic Quadrant fails to reflect those claims. Instead, IBM’s SoftLayer offering finds itself deep down in the “Visionaries” box. “The IBM Cloud experience is currently disjointed,” Gartner said. However, the analyst firm said it remains optimistic that IBM’s “Next-Generation Infrastructure” engineering project, which doesn’t yet have a release date, could improve its position.

Also struggling to catch up is Oracle Corp., which came in for some fairly harsh criticism from Gartner’s analysts. Although they praised the company for the design of its hyperscale cloud architecture and its thoughtful selection of features, they also noted its platform offers little that differentiates itself from its rivals. They concluded that Oracle’s Gen 2 cloud offering is a “minimum viable product,” with only a basic selection of cloud IaaS compute, storage and networking capabilities.

The last remaining “Visionary” in Gartner’s list is a new entrant, Alibaba Cloud, operated by the Chinese web giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Alibaba Cloud is the dark horse thanks to its financial muscle and its commanding lead in the Chinese IaaS market. Gartner said it expects Alibaba Cloud to continue making significant investments to beef up its offerings and that it has the “potential to become an alternative to the global hyperscale cloud providers in select regions over time.” For now, though, it remains considerably behind the likes of AWS and Microsoft because of its “limited track record” and the weakness of its international cloud platform, which doesn’t possess the same capabilities or performance of its Chinese version.

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