Seven things you need to know from Gartner's cloud Magic Quadrant
Gartner analyst Raj Bala guides CRN through the key points of the analyst’s latest report
AWS is facing a "tough challenge" to keep its market lead from its rival pubic cloud providers, according to Raj Bala, Gartner analyst and co-writer of its latest cloud Magic Quadrant.
Previous incarnations of the quadrant evaluated only infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings, but this year's iteration combines IaaS and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings.
Bala, one of the report's authors, outlined his key takeaways from the new and improved public cloud Magic Quadrant.
The gap is narrowing
Only seven public cloud vendors make the cut, and all slot into two segments: ‘leaders' and ‘niche'. Of the leaders, Amazon Web Services (AWS) takes a commanding lead, but Microsoft and Google Cloud are not too far behind.
Of the niche players, Alibaba has gained significant ground from 2019's quadrant and is close to crossing over to either a ‘challenger' or ‘leader'.
Bala emphasised that a direct comparison can't be made to between the 2020 iteration of the quadrant and its predecessors, as the latest version takes more factors into account than previous years.
"Hyperscale cloud providers, and the broad array of services they offer beyond IaaS, have found strategic importance in Gartner's enterprise clients and the magic quadrant needed to evolve to reflect as much," the analyst house explained of the change.
"However, AWS does continue to dominate but what is happening is feature compression," Bala said.
"Multiple vendors in the market are beginning to narrow in terms of their capabilities and we are at the start of that.
"Oracle, Google and Alibaba are really accelerating in their capabilities and beginning to catch up with vendors who had a traditional lead."
Tencent has been added
Chinese provider Tencent joins its well-established peers on the quadrant for the first time.
Gartner noted that the provider is concentrated on its native Chinese market and is best used for gaming purposes and cloud-native workloads that operate primarily in China.
It also has a larger IaaS market share on a global basis than either IBM or Oracle, as well as having enough tailwind behind it to take on Alibaba, the report added
"It has the technical acumen to be a formidable challenger to Alibaba Cloud, its most important domestic rival," stated the report.
"Tencent Cloud has grown quickly, and the company has made public statements about large future investments in the cloud market. Furthermore, Tencent Cloud is distinguished by being the only hyperscale cloud provider with a region in Russia."
However, the provider's lack of brand recognition outside of its home market, as well as an absent MSP channel outside of China was noted as its biggest weaknesses by the analyst house.
Azure is not so assured
Microsoft Azure - which holds the second-largest share of the public cloud market - came in for the strongest criticism in the Magic Quadrant.
The analyst house criticised the tech giant for having the lowest ratio of availability zones to regions compared to its competitors and offering a limited set of support services to those zones.
"Gartner continues to have concerns related to the overall architecture and implementation of Azure, despite resilience-focused engineering efforts and improved service availability metrics during the past year," the report stated.
Microsoft uses a "pair model" for its availability zones, and Bala added that it has been slow to adopt the "modern" availability zone model.
"Microsoft has been rather slow with how they are building out availability zones. They are the slowest compared to any provider," Bala told CRN.
The capacity issues Azure faced early in the pandemic was also highlighted as a concern for the analyst, particularly with regard to the fact it doesn't offer capacity guarantees to customers
"Microsoft does not provide any form of guaranteed capacity to customers; even prepaid agreements and reserved instances are not capacity guarantees," the report stated.
"When there were COVID-19-related customer-affecting capacity shortfalls in multiple European regions over a multiweek period, a small number of customers were unable to provision reserved instances or capacity for which they had already paid."
Google is on the rise
Google Cloud was praised for its "market-moving" open source innovations that have "changed the course" of enterprise IT.
It has also made "significant gains" by closing a number of critical capability gaps between itself and Azure, its closest competitor.
However, attention was drawn to the caution that remains among end users about the vendor's commitment to enterprise clients, as well as its "continued struggle" with having an enterprise mindset in the field.
Its place in the larger Google organisation also came in for some criticism from Gartner.
"From a financial perspective, Google Cloud's revenue is a small fraction of overall Google revenue and Google Cloud's criticality to the overall business is not as clear as its competitors. Furthermore, its success may erode the company's overall healthy gross margins," the report added.
Oracle is widening its base
Niche player Oracle has been capitalising on markets outside of America and Europe and, as such, has accelerated its worldwide presence the most in the past year, Bala said.
The database vendor has been making inroads in the Middle East, he said, where it has a "strong influence" in some of that region's countries.
"Notably, Oracle is the only hyperscale cloud platform in this magic quadrant with a datacentre in Saudi Arabia, due to a challenging political climate that prevents others from entering," Bala noted.
However, the vendor was rebuked for having a low market share in the database platform-as-a-service (dbPaaS) segment, despite its database history.
Oracle has a relatively low market share in the public cloud dbPaaS segment, which is particularly significant for a company with a history tied to its database offerings.
Chinese vendors face a 'barrier'
The pair of China-based vendors on the list, Alibaba Cloud and Tencent, were cautioned for their focus on their home market to the disadvantage of further international expansion.
Gartner acknowledged that geopolitical challenges presented a "barrier" for Alibaba in Europe and North America.
Bala outlined his concerns about the vendor's creativity, noting that it "copies out of the AWS playbook" and this could hamper its expansion into markets outside of Asia.
"The tendency we have in the West is to see the race between Google Cloud, Azure and AWS, but its actually Alibaba Cloud, Azure and AWS," he explained.
"Alibaba has this incredible ability to compete on a product basis, but I question their ability to out-innovate the other three vendors; they are taking what works in the West and bringing it to Asia."
‘Tough challenge' ahead for AWS
There is still the potential for upset among the hyperscalers as there are still a large number of markets "up for grabs", Bala explained.
Alibaba is poised to capitalise on significant increases in cloud spending in neighbouring Asian countries, such as Malaysia and Indonesia, while Oracle is growing its market share in Middle Eastern markets. There is also opportunity in Latin America, where cloud adoption has been slower.
"East Asia is a battle between Alibaba and AWS," Bala said. "In the Middle East, we are looking at Oracle, which has a really strong influence in some of those areas.
"There are parts of the world that are still up for grabs and AWS will be faced with a tough challenge."