Gartner just released the 2013 update of his traditionally Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Here are some consideration about the evaluation methodology and MQ players. 

In the context of this Magic Quadrant, IaaS is defined by Gartner as “a standardized, highly automated offering, where compute resources, complemented by storage and networking capabilities, are owned by a service provider and offered to the customer on demand. The resources are scalable and elastic in near-real-time, and metered by use. Self-service interfaces are exposed directly to the customer, including a Web-based UI and API optionally. The resources may be single-tenant or multitenant, and hosted by the service provider or on-premises in the customer’s datacentre.”

To be included in Magic Quadrant IaaS providers should target enterprise and midmarket customers, offering high-quality services, with excellent availability, good performance, high security and good customer support. For each IaaS provider included in MQ Gartner is offering deep description related to services offer like: datacentre locations, computing issues, storage & network features, special notes, and recommended users. Also deep comments about Strengths & Caution in Cloud adoption are offered for each IaaS provider, despite the MQ positioning.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for IaaS is a more than eloquent picture of actual status of IaaS major players. IaaS market momentum is strongly dominated by Amazon Web Services both Vision and Execution essentially directions. According Garner analysts, AWS is a clear leader, with more than five times the compute capacity in use than the aggregate total of the other fourteen providers included in MQ. AWS is appreciated for “innovative, exceptionally agile and very responsive to the market and the richest IaaS product portfolio”.

The Leaders Quadrant is positioning CSC as second player, a traditional IT outsourcer with a broad range of datacentre outsourcing capabilities. CSC is appreciated for his commitment to embrace the highly standardized cloud model, and his solid platform attractive to traditional IT operations organizations that still want to retain control, but need to offer greater agility to the business

The Challengers Quadrant is including Verizon Terremark – the market share leader in VMware-virtualized public cloud IaaS, Dimension Data – a large SI and VAR entering in the cloud IaaS market through the 2011 acquisition of OpSource, and Savvis – a CenturyLink company with a long track record of leadership in the hosting market.

Big surprise for Visionaries Quadrant is the comfortable positioning of Microsoft with his Windows Azure platform.  Previously strictly PaaS, Azure is becoming IaaS also in April 2013 when Microsoft launched Windows Azure Infrastructure Services which include Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks.  Microsoft place in Visionary Quadrant is motivated by Gartner by the global vision of infrastructure and platform services “that are not only leading stand-alone offerings, but also seamlessly extend and interoperate with on-premises Microsoft infrastructure (rooted in Hyper-V, Windows Server, Active Directory and System Center) and applications, as well as Microsoft’s SaaS offerings.”  

Between the IaaS providers from the Niche Players Quadrant, we have to note the presence of heawy playes triade: IBM, HP, and Fujitsu. Gartner appreciate IBM for his wide range of cloud-related products and services, IaaS MQ analyse including only cloud offering from SmartCloud Enterprise (SCE) and cloud-enabled infrastructure service IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+. In the same way, from HP’s range of cloud-related products and services Gartner is considered only HP Public Cloud and some cloud-enabled infrastructure services, such HP Enterprise Services Virtual Private Cloud. Fujitsu is one of the few non-American cloud providers, being appreciated by Gartner for the large cloud IaaS offerings, including the Fujitsu Cloud IaaS Trusted Public S5 (formerly the Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform), multiple regional offerings based on a global reference architecture (Fujitsu Cloud IaaS Private Hosted, formerly known as Fujitsu Local Cloud Platform), and multiple private cloud offerings, especially in Asia-Pacific area and Europe.

Speaking about non-America regions we should observe that significant European-based providers like CloudSigma, Colt, Gigas, Orange Business Services, OVH and Skyscape Cloud Services was not included in this Magic Quadrant. The same for Asia/Pacific region with major players like Datapipe, NTT and Tata Communications.

Gartner considered also two offerings that are currently in beta stage, and therefore could not be included in this evaluation, but could be considered as prospective players of next MQ edition: Google Compute Engine (GCE) – a model similar to Amazon EC2’s, and VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) – a full-featured offering with more functionality than vCloud Datacenter Service.

Sources: Gartner public Web pages & Blogs, Cloud Computing Groups Discussions.