Three major players in IaaS market - 2016





IT Analysis & research firm Gartner Inc. has published a report in last August. Report evaluates companies for IaaS (Infrastruce as a Service) worldwide.

IaaS is counted as a fastest growing IT Services in corporate IT spending. In the market however only very few companies can make progress in terms of market share. It is becoming highly difficult for the smaller companies to progress and establish consolidation.

On its 2016 report, Gartner Inc. defines IaaS 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.”

IT organizations are either focused on, “maintaining existing stuff” or “building new stuff”. According to Gartner, most IaaS is bought for “building new stuff”, new cloud applications. But on the other hand, cloud IaaS is also increasingly being purchased “maintaining existing stuff” traditional IT purposes.

According to Gartner report, IaaS has consolidated significantly around three leading service providers in 2016. The future of other service providers is increasingly uncertain and customers must carefully manage provider-related risks. 

Although Gartner report features 10 vendors in IaaS Magic Quadrant report, majority of the market is dominated by the three largest IaaS providers. These are:

Amazon Web Services AWS
Microsoft Azure
Google Cloud Platform

The above IaaS platforms also combine IaaS with PaaS (Platform as a Service).

Vendors selected for the other 7 as Niche include: 

CenturyLink Inc 
Fujitsu Ltd 
IBM Softlayer
NTT Communications Co.Ltd
Rackspace Inc 
Virtustream 
VMware

Here is some warnings to clients for Niche players: “Some Niche Players may be excellent providers for the use cases in which they specialize, but do not serve a broad range of use cases well or have a broadly ambitious road map. Some may have solid leadership positions in markets adjacent to this market, but have only developed limited capabilities in cloud IaaS. Providers that specialize in managed services on top of a 'good enough' IaaS platform may be in this category. Finally, some Niche Players have weak offerings, or have cloud IaaS businesses with uncertain futures, and should only be chosen with careful attention to managing vendor-related risks.”

But large market leaders are not always the right choice for a business. “A focused, smaller vendor can provide excellent support and commitment to individual customers,” according to the report.

Download Gartner report  on IaaS 2016>>