InsightaaS: Much has been written about Gartner’s recent take on the IaaS market (including a brief piece that I published in the TCBC forum on LinkedIn). The linkedIn piece focuses on the contention that buyers should beware of suppliers other than AWS, Microsoft and Google. Today’s featured post, from TechRepublic, takes a somewhat different approach. It highlights the massive gap between AWS and Microsoft, and between these two firms and the rest of the market, using both the Magic Quadrant analysis (helpfully, from both 2014 and 2015; parenthetically, the TechRepublic piece is worth a read strictly on the basis of this comparison) and market share. The share statistics (as furnished by Gartner) are sobering: the TechRepublic article quotes the analyst firm as stating that “in 2015 AWS delivers over 10X the utilized cloud capacity of its largest 14 competitors combined” – up from 5x in 2014. The piece goes on to say that “Microsoft’s utilized compute capacity is twice as big as the next 12 competitors combined.”
Clearly, these are enormous differences (if true – I’m not entirely certain how they could be validated, especially given the secrecy that AWS likes to cloak itself in). But does it mean that buyers should consider only these options? As I said in the LinkedIn post, I believe that the IaaS stack is de-laminating – even if AWS/MS/another giant ends up as an important component of the overall solution, it may not be true that these are the only solution options…
What a difference a year makes in cloud cuckoo land!
Despite increased traction from Microsoft Azure, punishing price reductions from Google, and a lot of wishful thinking from most everywhere else, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has managed to double its lead against its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) competitors.
That’s right, double it.
While Gartner found that AWS had 5X the utilized capacity of its next nearest 14 competitors combined, in 2015 the venerable analyst firm finds that number has exploded to 10X.
Is this cloud arms race already over?
Hegemony by any other name…
There are at least two ways to look the cloud race, and both favor AWS. The first is to take Gartner’s Magic Quadrant (MQ) for IaaS, which incorporates a range of attributes (ability to execute, etc.) to come up with a composite score that evaluates the strength of different cloud vendors.
It’s not surprising to see AWS dominate the IaaS market. But it is, perhaps, surprising to see just how dominant it is, given the progress Microsoft Azure has made over the past year, in particular…
Read the entire article on the TechRepublic website: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/aws-now-10x-the-size-of-its-competitors-is-the-cloud-arms-race-over/
