Just like the Amazon rainforest is the biggest around (deforestation notwithstanding), the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud beats the competition, at least according to Gartner and the "Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service" report.
While sounding like something out of a Harry Potter novel, the magic quadrant is actually a means of technology ranking. It spreads companies across four squares split by an x-axis (represents "completeness of vision") and a y-axis ("ability to execute"). The best technology lies on the top right, the worst on the lower left. Sounds simple enough!
Filling the quadrant involves customer references, hands-on service trials, information from cloud providers, surveys of over 75 providers and a number of service provider interviews.
In this case Gartner ranks the 15 largest cloud players as based on estimated market share.
Either way, AWS ranks on top in both vision and execution, having "systematically addressed the barriers to “mainstream” enterprise adoption" despite some weaknesses in pricing complexity and support offerings.
Trailing second in the diagram is CSC, a VMware-based niche offering "a solid platform attractive to traditional IT operations organizations that still want to retain control, but need to offer greater agility to the business and are willing to embrace data center transformation."
Other companies described as "niche players" include HP, GoGrid, SoftLayer, Fujitsu, Virtustream, Tier 3 and Joyent. Dimension Data, Savvis and Terremark appear in the top left as "challengers."
Right in the centre of the diagram OpenStack king Rackspace, sitting relatively close to a "visionary" Microsoft.
IBM is dead last, being in the bottom left, reflecting Big Blue's failure to match the predatory likes of Amazon.
One fact evident is the sheer scale of the Amazon operation. As Gartner puts it, "AWS is the overwhelming market share leader, with more than 5 times the compute capacity in use than the aggregate total of the other 14 providers in this Magic Quadrant."
However the situation might change in the future-- Microsoft continues to aggressively push Azure, Google will soon take on IaaS and IBM still has to integrate recent acquisition SoftLayer. "[T]he new MQ iteration reflects the cold reality of a market that is highly competitive and is becoming even more so," Gartner concludes.
