News

Microsoft, Amazon Solidify 'Leader' Positions in IaaS Market Report

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• May 21, 2015

Research firm Gartner Inc. has singled out Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure as the two runaway leaders in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) space.

In its most recent Magic Quadrant report released this week, Gartner identified AWS and Azure as the only "leaders" in its IaaS classification of cloud providers. Close followers, which Gartner describes as "visionaries," include CenturyLink, Google, VMware and IBM/SoftLayer. Among the others that Gartner described as "niche" providers were Rackspace, Joyent, Virtustream, Interroute, CSC, Dimension Data, Fujitsu, NTT Communications and Verizon.

Between AWS and Azure, Gartner pointed to the former as being superior. "AWS has a diverse customer base and the broadest range of use cases, including enterprise and mission-critical applications," the report said. "It is the overwhelming market share leader, with over 10 times more cloud IaaS compute capacity in use than the aggregate total of the other 14 providers in this Magic Quadrant."

AWS still maintains a multiyear competitive advantage over both Microsoft and Google, Gartner said. In a statement, a Microsoft spokesperson countered by noting that Azure still offers more than twice as much cloud IaaS compute capacity in use as the aggregate total of the remaining providers in this Magic Quadrant other than AWS.

Microsoft officials also frequently point out that it has more datacenters (19) around the world than AWS and Google combined.

"This speaks strongly to Gartner's belief that the IaaS market is quickly consolidating around a small number of leading vendors," the Microsoft spokesperson said. "Microsoft is seeing significant usage and growth for Azure with more than 90,000 new Azure customer subscriptions every month, more than 50 trillion objects now stored in the Azure storage system and 425 million users stored in Azure Active Directory. In addition to strong use of Infrastructure-as-a-Service capabilities, we're also seeing over 60 percent of Azure customers using at least one higher-level service."

According to Gartner, AWS "has the richest array of IaaS features and PaaS-like capabilities. It continues to rapidly expand its service offerings and offer higher-level solutions."

For its part, Microsoft argues that it's the only vendor identified as a leader in both Gartner's IaaS and PaaS categories. "We also are differentiated in our ability to enable customers to use these capabilities together in a seamless fashion," the Microsoft spokesperson said. "For example, Azure Resource Manager enables a single coherent application model for IaaS and PaaS services and the Azure Preview Portal blends IaaS and PaaS seamlessly so that customers no longer have to work in multiple, disparate environments."

Gartner also pointed to reliability problems that have plagued Azure, including numerous outages, though it notes Microsoft has made substantial improvements over the past year. "We are committed to applying learnings when incidents occur to prevent recurrences of similar interruptions and improve our communications and support response so that customers feel confident in us and the service," the Microsoft spokesperson said, pointing to Microsoft's  Root Cause Analysis to see the most recent improvements.

The Gartner report also urged those choosing Azure not to jump in too fast. "Customers who intend to adopt Azure strategically and migrate applications over a period of one year or more (finishing in 2016 or later) can begin to deploy some workloads now, but those with a broad range of immediate enterprise needs may encounter challenges," the report advised.

Microsoft said it has aggressive plans to add new features, noting that Gartner even acknowledged as much in the report. The spokesperson added, "Over the past 12 months, we've added more than 500 new features and services to the Azure platform, including robust IaaS and PaaS capabilities, as well as offerings that enable consistency across on-prem and the cloud so customers can achieve the hybrid scenarios they demand."

At its Ignite conference last month, Microsoft announced extensive new hybrid cloud computing features coming in the form of the new Azure Stack, which the company believes will give it an edge over both AWS and Google.