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Analyst firm Gartner’s 2018 Magic Quadrant for infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) has again found that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are the most mature clouds, but has omitted more than half of the vendors it covered last year on grounds that customers now demand more than just rented servers and storage.
“Customers now have high expectations from their cloud IaaS providers. They demand market-leading technical capabilities — depth and breadth of features, along with high availability, performance and security,” wrote Gartner’s mages. “They expect not only ‘hardware’ infrastructure features, but also management features, developer services and cloud software infrastructure services, including fully integrated PaaS capabilities.”
Given those expectations, Gartner was happy to drop eight clouds from this year’s Quadrant, farewelling Virtustream, CenturyLink, Joyent, Rackspace, Interoute, Fujitsu, Skytap and NTT.
The analyst firm says AWS is the most mature cloud and has come to be seen as a safe choice, but cautions “Customers should be aware that while it's easy to get started, optimal use — especially keeping up with new service innovations and best practices, and managing costs — may challenge even highly agile, expert IT organizations, including AWS partners. As new, less-experienced MSPs are added to AWS's Audited MSP Partner program, this designation is becoming less of an assurance of MSP quality.”
Microsoft’s Azure has similar problems: Gartner says “Microsoft's sales, field solutions architects and professional service teams did not have an adequate technical understanding of Azure.”
[...] The firm also rates Azure as “optimized to deliver ease of use to novices with simple projects” which is great but “comes at the cost of sometimes making complex configurations difficult and frustrating to implement.”
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Thursday May 31 2018, @05:37PM (3 children)
M$ has undergone many reorganizations in just the last few years. How many of those shuffles are to move the few remaining profitable divisions under the Azure albatross in an effort to make it look like revenue for that division has been growing? The Securities Exchange Commission filings [sec.gov] are always carefully crafted to conceal crap and present a rosy picture but I suspect that a small amount of detective work would bring out enough information to show who is cooking the books [computerworld.com] in regards to hosted services.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Thursday May 31 2018, @07:24PM (1 child)
I think there's an important difference between checking whether Microsoft is investing in Azure to become a major cloud player versus figuring out whether Azure is profitable. Microsoft can afford to lose many billions of dollars a year for some time, and as long as it's profitable eventually they're fine. Also, as much as I hate the company I think it makes sense for them to pivot this way.
I think it's premature for the Gartner group to just dump the other players. This space is still young, and I could easily imagine that in ten years the options available with OpenShift, Apache Mesos, CockroachDB and OpenFlow or similar tech means anyone can pick any Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud vendor like Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr, Scaleway, or whatever and build their own functionally equivalent of one of the fancier services in AWS in three days at half the cost.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by arslan on Friday June 01 2018, @01:58AM
They're not dumping on anyone. Their quadrant is updated regularly, as other players mature they'll move up. It is just a view in time. They have it pretty right in terms of the AWS being the leader of the pack and MS behind and Google next from an enterprise offering perspective.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Thursday May 31 2018, @08:20PM
Microsoft climbing back toward most valuable company in the world [nextbigfuture.com]
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