Amazon Web Services Inc., the Golden Quadrant for Cloud Computing and Network Services research, made available on its website this week. IBM Corp fills out the niche segment with Alibaba and Oracle. Overall, Gartner analyst Raj Bala, one of the co-authors of the study in an interview that AWS remains a strong leader, especially in terms of market share. But the competition is narrowing as Google, Oracle and Alibaba are all increasing their software capabilities.
“Oracle, Google, and Alibaba have jumped on gas power in the past year,” he said. Gartner offers three benefits and three cautions to each supplier. Notable and perhaps most interesting are the alerts given by Gartner for Microsoft’s Azure cloud, which has received a variety of high-profile sales. This involves a now contested $10 billion Joint Enterprise Military Technology deal with the Defence Department, which AWS is contesting.
For one thing, Gartner said, Azure has the lowest ratio of the availability zones to the total regions of any company in the Magic Quadrant and a “limited” range of resources to serve those availability zones. “As a result, Gartner continues to have reservations regarding the overall design and deployment of Azure, Through resilience-focused technical activities and strengthened service efficiency indicators over the past year, “said Bala’s report with fellow analysts Bob Gill, Dennis Smith, David Wright, and Kevin Ji. “This is a huge gap between some of the providers in this room,” added Bala, Who noticed that Microsoft is using an older model using two local sites combined for disaster relief rather than the “new” one using access zones. Another warning is that Microsoft does not offer “any sort” of assured storage that resulted in COVID-19 availability shortfalls in a variety of European regions, meaning that certain customers could not access already allocated cloud services or facilities.
Third, Gartner said that Microsoft support can be “extremely costly,” particularly for customers who haven’t had support services before. All that said, Gartner lauded Azure’s “full end-to-end collection of solutions applicable to a diverse variety of workloads and technologies,” its “concerted” commitment to best support software developers, and its benefits for businesses that are already Microsoft stores. “It’s front and center when I use the API for an AWS application that one is fundamentally different from another one,” Bala said. Finally, Gartner said price reductions that AWS regularly claims are not across the board, particularly for its computing business.
Google Cloud’s leadership was lauded for its open-source inventions, such as Kubernetes and Tensor Flow, Its growing market share and capability increase relative to Azure and its big computer, data science, and hybrid and multi-cloud technologies such as Anthos. “From the basis of product implementation, they have no concern,” he said. “They also have some challenges in the industry and to be thought of as a legal provider of business IT,” Bala said.
