It’s lonely at the top of the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) space.
According to Gartner Inc.’s new Magic Quadrant report, Amazon Web Services Inc. is the leader in both axes. Only Microsoft joins it in “Leaders”.
Only Google, Alibaba Cloud and Oracle were listed in the “Visionaries”, while the “Challengers” section was empty. All eight IaaS providers were considered “Niche Players”.
According to the report, “AWS remains the dominant market leader in IaaS+PaaS and integrated IaaS+PaaS with an end-of 2016 revenue run rate exceeding $14 billion.” It is still the thought leader and reference point for all other competitors. The company continues to innovate at an accelerating pace and has a growing impact on a variety of IT markets.
It is the most frequently chosen provider for strategic adoption. Many enterprise customers spend more than $5 million annually and a few spend over $100 millions. Although it is not the best fit for all needs, it has become the “safe choice” in this market, appealing primarily to customers who want the broadest range possible and long-term market leadership.
[Click on the image to see a larger view.] Gartner 2017 IaaS Magic Quadrant (source Gartner). The research confirms many previous studies in the cloud space. AWS is the unquestioned leader with a huge lead in the industry, while Microsoft and other competitors are chasing it with faster growth rates, but still far behind.
AWS and Microsoft were the only leaders in the report last year on the same topic.
Gartner’s new report states that the market has consolidated significantly over the past year. AWS and Microsoft Azure have accounted almost for all IaaS-related infrastructure usage in cloud IaaS since 2016. Their dominance is even greater if you include their PaaS related infrastructure consumption. AWS is also many times larger than Microsoft Azure, further skewing market structure.
Gartner stated that specific expertise is needed to implement the Amazon cloud’s vast array of services. This is partially mitigated by technical support. The report stated that customers should be aware that although it’s simple to get started, optimal usage — especially keeping up-to-date with new service innovations, best practices and managing costs — can be challenging for even highly skilled IT organizations, including AWS partners.