As businesses experiment more with AI, integrate SaaS platforms, and strive to lower maintenance work, the public cloud has become many organizations’ infrastructure of choice.
Yet, how businesses interact with the public cloud is changing. As Gartner reports, more now ask: what can we do with this cloud provider? Instead of: what can this cloud provider do?
This Gartner Magic Quadrant aspires to help businesses ready to embrace this mentality shift and compare providers on critical buying criteria.
To do so, the analyst dissected seven prominent providers of strategic cloud platform services before isolating four market leaders.
The Definition of Strategic Cloud Platform Services
Strategic cloud platform services is an umbrella term for the infrastructure, platform, and transformation services public cloud providers offer. Examples for each include:
- Computing, network, and storage services (infrastructure services).
- Managed application and data services (platform services).
- Resources that support customer adoption of cloud-oriented IT delivery models (transformation services).
As per Gartner, businesses leverage these services when embarking upon four types of cloud journey: tech replacement, cloud-native adoption, cloud innovation, and business transformation.
Each journey requires a special blend of the services above. Yet, few cloud platform services will possess the comprehensive capabilities required to meet diverse enterprise needs, guide a business's direction, and offer essential support services along the way.
Thankfully, the Magic Quadrant helps businesses select the best-fit provider by giving insights into seven such vendors' perceived strengths and cautions.
To determine all this, Gartner created a comprehensive set of criteria, including essential features, additional services, and global support programs for transformation efforts.
After, the research firm created the following matrix, with each provider split into four groups: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, and Niche Players.
Gartner Magic Quadrant Leaders
Leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant can boast an ambitious roadmap, significant market share, and many positive customer references. They may not excel in all areas or be the best providers for specific needs, but their services are often suitable for strategic adoption. This year's Leaders are:
- Amazon Web Services
- Microsoft
- Oracle
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS excels in the depth of its cloud infrastructure and platform services, which are “often more mature” than its market rivals. As Gartner notes, its core IaaS and PaaS services typically help establish the standards and price points for the space. The analyst also commends AWS for its large, capable partner ecosystem and hardware design innovations. Exemplifying the latter, AWS was the first provider to design its own Advanced-RISC-Machine- (ARM-) based chipsets and deploy performance security and acceleration through hardware offload via its Nitro System.