Gartner’s 2015 Cloud IaaS Magic Quadrant

Date posted: 2nd November 2015

The world of IT is migrating to the cloud. Global spending growing for years have finally hit an tipping point with Amazon Web Services becoming the dominant force following their 3rd quarter results. The cloud infrastructure market should approach $16.5 billion in 2015 spend making it the reality of IT rather than the hot buzz word of years past.

Public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services have created an tsunami which is forcing both the old-guard OEMs and their associated value-added resellers (VARs) to scramble for a new business model. Netfast as a Cloud Managed Services provider is here to help guide New York’s mid-market businesses to the cloud. Today we will review from Gartner the 2015 Cloud IaaS Magic Quadrant.

Market Leader: Amazon Web Services

The unstoppable public cloud of Amazon barrels on, creating the IT tsunami that has murdered the OGO/VAR relationships of yesteryear. Gartner stated “its [Amazon] public cloud retains a multiyear competitive advantage [over Microsoft and Google]”

Advantages of Amazon Web Services: 

• Large technology eco-system to integrate into the platform
• Extensive network of partners that provide app development expertise, cloud managed services and professional services such as data center migration.
• Richest array of IaaS and PaaS capabilities with rapid expansion of service offerings as annouced at re:Invent conference

Cautions of Amazon Web Services:

• Not as easy to manage as believed. Gartner recommends working with a trusted managed services provider.
• Some capabilities compete with partners, careful eco-system management a must

Visionary Leader: CenturyLink

Gartner rates CenturyLink recent acquisitions highly in the voice cloud market.

Advantages of CenturyLink

• Wide range of capabilities, easily accessible
• Strong self-service platform
• Enterprise class solutions including Managed Security Services

Cautions of CenturyLink:

• Competing with deep pocket market leading competitors
• May not be able to execute on road map at aggressive pace

Visionary 2: IBM SoftLayer

Gartner ranks IBM SoftLayer as feature rich but execution poor.

Visionary 3: Google

Gartner ranks Google toward the bottom of visionary with the main cautions being their lack of enterprise and midmarket customer engagement along with low trust and non-existent partner eco-system

Leader: Microsoft Azure

Gartner ranks Microsoft Azure as fast growing with high capacity compute but weak partner eco-system and caution for many past Azure outages

Niche Player: Rackspace

Gartner ranks Rackspace as having a strong set of basic features but lacks the ability to integrate these in a cohesive manner