I am late to updating the geographic view of Gartner’s Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Magic Quadrant. Here is the update for 2017 (see 2016, 2015):
Commentary:
1\ The Seattle region (aka the Leaders quadrant) is unchanged. This supermassive region may turn into a black hole, warp the space-time continuum, and consume most of the world’s $2.5 trillion in IT spending. A hat tip to Seattle companies CenturyLink and Skytap who presumably by virtue of breathing the local air also make the magic quadrant, albeit in inner Nichelandia.
2\ The biggest change this year is the introduction of the Lesser Seattle region (and only truly old school Seattleites will fully appreciate that label), which captures companies that may physically do their cloud work in Seattle, but are not wholly of Seattle or the cloud.
Previously we have included Google in the Seattle region, but the company’s cloud efforts have undergone a major transition. What had been a largely unsupervised outpost in Seattle that couldn’t help but marinate in all things cloud has become “strategic” and returned to the corporate yoke in Mountain View. This shift in center of gravity and management accretion has resulted in key personnel departures and left Google Cloud as perhaps the company’s number six or seven priority in the fight for corporate attention and resources.
Joining Google as an inaugural member of the Lesser Seattle region is Oracle, who have been busily hiring the most mercenary and/or aggrieved of AWS and Azure employees to staff their latest attempt to do cloud (I regret I have lost count of what attempt number this is). They are at least enthusiastic about it, to quote one delusional Oracle recruiter: “We’re the only company delivering the most compelling services at every layer of the cloud.”
3\ Denizens of Nichelandia
Alibaba’s Alicloud makes its MQ debut sited on the finest property in all of Nichelandia. It will be very interesting to see if they can get customer traction beyond China.
Gartner seems to have decided not to fight the battle this year with IBM about their position on the MQ (IBM last year delayed the MQ release by over two months with massive executive escalations, because at this stage they’re pretty much down to browbeating analysts, exploiting tax loopholes, and hyping perpetual motion machine Watson). Instead, Gartner finessed the issue by optimistically positioning them in eastern Nichelandia based on a product that doesn’t actually exist while highlighting their actual cloud offering is a clown show perhaps less than you might expect from a company that proclaims with Watson-esque bravado that it is “the enterprise cloud leader”:
The current offering is SoftLayer infrastructure, not NGI (Next Generation Infrastructure). Other than an early 2015 introduction of new storage options, SoftLayer’s feature set has not improved significantly since the IBM acquisition in mid-2013; it is SMB-centric, hosting-oriented and missing many cloud IaaS capabilities required by midmarket and enterprise customers. The details of the future NGI-based cloud IaaS offerings have not been announced. IBM has, throughout its history in the cloud IaaS business, repeatedly encountered engineering challenges that have negatively impacted its time to market. It has discontinued a previous attempt at a new cloud IaaS offering, an OpenStack-based infrastructure that was offered via the Bluemix portal in a 2016 beta. Customers must thus absorb the risk of an uncertain roadmap. This uncertainty also impacts partners, and therefore the potential ecosystem.
The IBM Cloud experience is currently disjointed. Some compute capabilities, such as the IBM Bluemix Container Service and OpenWhisk, reside in Bluemix, but Bluemix is hosted in just three SoftLayer data centers, and is thus not local to most SoftLayer infrastructure. Some SoftLayer infrastructure can be provisioned through the Bluemix portal, but this is not currently an integrated IaaS+PaaS offering, because Bluemix and SoftLayer do not share a single self-service portal and catalog with a consistent CLI and API; do not provide customers with a single integrated low-latency network context; and do not offer a unified security context that allows the customer self-service visibility and control across the entire environment.
Finally, even in Nichelandia, self-proclaimed technology powerhouses Los Angeles and New York City are inexplicably unrepresented. Instead they will pay rent to the big cloud providers who will also pluck their tenants’ juiciest morsels as platform vendors inevitably do (and Amazon will probably even pluck less juicy morsels like the putting-stuff-in-a-box-and-shipping-it “technology” companies so popular in these ecosystems).
