It’s as if the left hand side of the 2017 Gartner Cloud MQ just imploded! And just as interesting, most of those that were in the Visionaries quadrant are now relegated to the Niche Players sector.
Only six players remain compared to last years 14. Lets see who has gone this year:
- Skytap
- NTT
- Joyent
- Interoute
- Fujitsu
- Rackspace
- CenturyLink
- Virtustream
It’s no surprise to those close to the ground that the only real survivors here thus far are AWS and MS Azure, with Google barely making it into the top right corner, which actually looks like they just flopped over the line from last year &mdash but progress none the less. And while the gap between the top two is closing, AWS is still far above in “Ability to execute”, and slightly ahead in “Completeness of vision”.
For those that had chosen one of the departed 8 as their Cloud provider, then its time to question what their strategy is, and what yours is. Gartner may have upped its inclusion requirements resulting in some of these players being filtered out, and that may have no impact on those providers. But it may resonate poorly for their sales prospects going forward, all of which could have a long term downward trend, increased cost per customer, loss of economies of scale, etc.
Meanwhile, the rate of innovation by service improvement, refinement, or new offerings continues.