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What’s Changed: Gartner’s 2015 Cloud IaaS Magic Quadrant

What's Changed: Gartner Magic Quadrant  2015 Infrastructure as a Service IaaSOn Tuesday night, IT research and analysis firm Gartner released the latest iteration of the highly influential  yearly report Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide.

Cloud computing is one of the fastest growing segments of corporate IT spending, and when people think of cloud computing, they usually thing of compute Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), says Gartner. Worldwide spending on Cloud IaaS will grow 32.8 percent in 2015, according to research revealed in the new report, and many of the world’s largest tech companies are in fierce competition over the rapidly consolidating market.

In the Magic Quadrant for cloud IaaS, Gartner evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of what it considers leading vendors in the compute IaaS market, and provides readers with a graph (the ‘Magic Quadrant’) plotting the vendors based on their ability to execute, and completeness of vision. The graph is divided into four quadrants: niche players, challengers, visionaries, and leaders. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications.

[From AWS to Rackspace, Solutions Review rounds up the top 28 cloud vendors in the 2015 Cloud Platform Solutions Buyer’s Guide. Solutions Review Buyer’s Guides include full market overviews and 10 questions designed to help find your best fit in the cloud. Download your free copy today.]
How Gartner groups and Evaluates Vendors

How Gartner groups and evaluates vendors, via gartner.com

This is the fourth iteration of the IaaS Magic Quadrant report, and as you might expect, there have been massive changes in the ever evolving and somewhat nascent (it is a HUGE baby, though) cloud computing market since the first report. In the last year alone we’ve seen considerable market consolidation, which has caused some changes in positions on the Magic Quadrant, as well as some vendors being dropped from the report.

At Solutions Review, We read the 38 page report, which we received in full via email from an Amazon Web Services representative, and pulled a few of what we consider the most important takeaways and key changes from the 2014 IaaS Magic Quadrant.

 What is Infrastructure as a Service? 

Cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Gartner says, is the ‘compute’ In cloud computing. An IaaS solution is a cloud service that provides compute, storage and network resources, delivered on-demand, in real-time (or as close as possible), as a service.

For the purposes of this report, Gartner has focused specifically on  Cloud Compute IaaS, which the company defines as  “standardized, highly automated offerings, where compute resources, complemented by storage and networking capabilities, are owned by a service provider and offered to the customer on demand.” Gartner did not include cloud storage services, platform as a service (PaaS) or managed services in the 2015 IaaS Magic Quadrant.

Beyond the resources themselves, Cloud IaaS also includes automated management of those resources, and management tools delivered as a service, says Gartner.

Mode 1 and Mode 2 IaaS

One major change in Gartner’s evaluation methodology is the inclusion of two new categories for applications: Mode 1 and Mode 2. According to Gartner, IT organizations are either focused on  “maintaining existing stuff” (Mode 1), or “building new stuff, in particular, cloud-native applications” (Mode 2).  In the new IaaS Magic Quadrant , Gartner recommends use cases for each vendor, based on these categories.

According to Gartner, most IaaS is bought for mode 2, but cloud IaaS is increasingly being purchased for Mode 1 traditional IT purposes as well.

How has the market changed?

 

 

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