Technology research and advisory firm Gartner, Inc. recently came out with its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for 2015. The Magic Quadrant evaluates cloud IaaS providers within the context of the fastest-growing need among Gartner clients – their desire to have a “data center in the cloud,” the research firm says.
The criteria for analyzing technology vendors consists of their:
- Ability to execute on their vision through the quality and efficacy of the processes, systems, methods or procedures that enable the IT providers’ performance to be competitive, efficient and effective; and
- Completeness of vision, or the vendors’ ability to articulate logical statements convincingly about current and future market direction, innovation, customer needs and competitive forces.
For the fourth consecutive year, cloud service provider Amazon Web Services – a subsidiary of Amazon.com – was placed in the “Leaders” quadrant, having both the furthest completeness of vision and the highest ability to execute.
Gartner describes leaders as those who offer services suitable for strategic adoption and have ambitious roadmaps. Leaders also have a track record of successful delivery, significant market share and “many referenceable customers.”
“At AWS, we invest in maintaining our position in cloud with an accelerating pace of innovation, a focus on operating efficiently at massive scale, and growing an expansive customer and partner ecosystem,” AWS says. “We have worked closely with industry leaders … to help them transform their existing businesses at a pace that cannot be duplicated with traditional infrastructure alternatives.”
According to Gartner, AWS has a diverse customer base and the broadest range of use cases, including enterprise and mission-critical applications. In addition, AWS is the overwhelming market share leader, with over 10 times more cloud IaaS compute capacity in use than the aggregate total of the other 14 providers in the Magic Quadrant, Gartner says.
“This has enabled (AWS) to attract a very large technology partner ecosystem that includes software vendors that have licensed and packaged their software to run on AWS, as well as many vendors that have integrated their software with AWS capabilities,” the research firm says.
AWS is also identified as a thought leader, known for being “extraordinarily innovative, exceptionally agile and very responsive to the market.” And while AWS is starting to face competition from Microsoft and Google, it retains a multiyear competitive advantage, Gartner explains.
AWS appeals to customers “who desire the broadest range of capabilities and long-term market leadership,” Gartner says. “It is the provider most commonly chosen for strategic adoption.”