Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services 2022

For Gartner clients, Magic Quadrant and Critical Capabilities research identifies and then analyses the most relevant providers and their products in a market. 

Leaders:

• AWS
• Azure
• GCP

Visionaries:

• Alibaba Cloud
• Oracle

Niche players:

• Tencent Cloud
• IBM
• Huawei Cloud

Excerpts -

The hyperscale cloud providers are in a race to colonize enterprises in an attempt to become the primary strategic supplier of cloud services to address a broad range of IT workloads.

The ultimate goal of the cloud providers is to move enterprises further up into the PaaS layer where the margins are higher and the ability to extricate workloads and processes become more difficult.

AWS’s revenue makes it the current market-share leader in the cloud infrastructure and platform services (CIPS) market, exceeding Microsoft Azure, its closest competitor, by two times.

AWS, the leading provider in this market by market share, has a relatively weak strategy to support customers seeking sovereign and multicloud solutions.

Google has historically attracted clients with aggressive pricing relative to its competition, but clients should be warned that the prices may not stay low forever. Google recently increased prices by 100% for some aspects of its storage services, for example.

Microsoft Azure is strong in all use cases, which include extended cloud and edge computing. Azure is particularly well-suited for Microsoft-centric organizations.

The complexity of Microsoft licensing and support costs extends to Azure: Customers find it difficult to consolidate their spend and negotiate private discounts in a simple and predictable way.

Microsoft is using licensing for its products, such as Windows and SQL Server, punitively against competitive cloud providers by making it more expensive to deploy Windows workloads anywhere other than Azure. There are also restrictions with the use of Microsoft licensing on Azure itself that are often not communicated to customers. For example, customers are not told about restrictive rules under Azure Hybrid Use Benefits in Azure multitenant environments.

IBM Cloud’s operations are geographically diversified and mostly focused on lift-and-shift and extended enterprise use cases. Its clients tend to be large and midsize enterprises.

IBM has a differentiated vision for modernizing enterprise workloads, such as those that run on IBM Power systems and IBM zSystems, to derive the agility benefits of cloud. IBM is one of the few providers with the assets and know-how to bring mainframe workloads focused on testing and development into modern environments.

Red Hat and OpenShift are core to IBM’s cloud strategy and serve as the  foundation for delivering IBM software on providers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure through the jointly branded offerings.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is mainly focused on lift and shift, hybrid and multicloud, and HPC, though OCI endeavors to have broad capabilities outside of Oracle-focused applications.

Multicloud architectures, where one workload spans multiple cloud providers, are central to OCI’s vision and its future offerings that live within and alongside providers such as AWS and Azure.

OCI scored well in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services (CIPS) and the 2022 Critical Capabilities for CIPS. 

OCI currently has 40 cloud regions in 22 countries. It is the first major cloud provider in Mexico.

OCI and Microsoft Azure launched Oracle Database Service for Azure, a new, fully managed service that enables Azure customers to easily provision, access, and operate enterprise-grade Oracle Database services in OCI with a familiar, Azure-like experience.