SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 2) by arslan on Friday June 01 2018, @02:02AM
The way they setup their Quadrant itself makes them biased. The fact that 1 of the 2 main criteria for the top left quadrant, the star quadrant, is characterized by "Ability to execute" means small companies or start-ups or just plain old open source offerings, no matter how good their tech or vision will never get there until they're bought by one of the big players or get financial backing from heavyweights.