Gartner Ranks Microsoft in Cloud IaaS

Revolutionize Your Business With Generative AI

From product design and software development to virtual agents, content creation, and reporting, GenAI is transforming business. Our AI experts help you unlock GenAI’s full potential and drive growth.

Let’s Get Started

CRN has a longish article about Gartner’s ranking (Note: you need to pay for the research) of Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) vendors.  Microsoft made the the list as a visionary.  Now before any Microsoft fans complain about Azure not being in the leadership quadrant, remember that Azure started out as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) play and has only recently moved into the IaaS space.  To be ranked so quickly says something.  Here’s a couple tidbits from the CRN article.

Windows Azure started out as a Platform-as-a-Service, but earlier this year Microsoft added IaaS to the mix. The software giant delivers its public cloud IaaS from data centers on the U.S. East and West Coasts, Ireland, the Netherlands, Hong Kong and Singapore. Microsoft also has a huge private cloud business based around Windows Server.
Strengths: Microsoft has focused on integrating its Azure public cloud IaaS with one premise infrastructure products like Active Directory and System Center, Gartner said. Other advantages Gartner listed include an “attractive and easy-to-use” user interface, global customer relationships and lots of experience running large-scale web services.
Cautions: Azure IaaS is still new and many of its key features are still in beta or “coming soon,” and Microsoft hasn’t yet built an ecosystem of partners around it, Gartner said. Azure also lacks enterprise Linux options and, overall, the offering is “very Microsoft-centric and appeals primarily to .Net developers,” Gartner said.

 
I think as Windows Azure builds out more capabilities and supports a variety of Java, Linux, and other platforms, we’ll see them move out of Visionary to Leadership in the next Magic Quadrant for IaaS release.