Page 1
28/08/2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1CKSZ0E&ct=121022&st=sg 1/17
Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as aService
18 October 2012 ID:G00237002
Analyst(s): Lydia Leong, Douglas Toombs, Bob Gill, Gregor Petri, Tiny Haynes
VIEW SUMMARY
Cloud compute infrastructure as a service (a virtual data center of compute, storage and network
resources delivered as a service) is a still-maturing, rapidly evolving market. Each service provider
has a unique offering, and the sourcing of these services must be done with care.
Market Definition/Description
Cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) parallels the infrastructure and data center initiatives of
IT. Cloud compute IaaS constitutes the largest segment of this market (the broader IaaS market
also includes cloud storage and cloud printing). Only cloud compute IaaS is evaluated in this Magic
Quadrant; it does not cover cloud storage providers, platform as a service (PaaS) providers,
software as a service (SaaS) providers, cloud services brokerages or any other type of cloud
service provider, nor should it be considered to be an evaluation of the broad, generalized cloud
computing strategies of the vendors.
Cloud compute IaaS (hereafter referred to simply as "cloud IaaS" or "IaaS"), in the context of this
Magic Quadrant, is defined as a standardized, highly automated offering, where compute
resources, complemented by storage and networking capabilities, are owned by a service
provider and offered to the customer on demand. The resources are scalable and elastic in near-
real-time, and metered by use. Self-service interfaces are exposed directly to the customer,
including a Web-based UI and, optionally, an API. The resources may be single-tenant or multi-
tenant, and hosted by the service provider or on-premises in the customer's data center.
This Magic Quadrant primarily evaluates cloud IaaS providers in the context of the fastest-growing
use case among Gartner clients: the desire to have a "data center in the cloud," where the
customer retains most of the IT operations responsibility. Gartner's clients are mainly enterprises,
midmarket businesses and technology companies of all sizes, and the evaluation focuses on
typical client requirements.
What Cloud IaaS Use Cases Are Covered by This Evaluation?
Gartner's market structure for cloud IaaS (defined in "Market Insight: Structuring the Cloud
Compute IaaS Market") segments the market by two axes: single application needs versus needs
that encompass multiple unrelated workloads; and the level of managed services. Unmanaged
solutions do not have formal IT operations management; self-managed solutions require the
customer to be responsible for all management at the guest OS layer and above; core foundation
managed solutions make the provider responsible for the guest OS and most security functions;
application stack managed solutions make the provider responsible for everything through the
middleware layer. The eight segments of the full market are:
Single application, unmanaged: developer-centric cloud hosting.
Single application, self-managed: scale-out cloud hosting.
Single application, core foundation managed: simple managed cloud hosting.
Single application, application stack managed: complex managed cloud hosting.
Multiple unrelated workloads, unmanaged: virtual lab environment.
Multiple unrelated workloads, self-managed: self-managed virtual data center (VDC).
Multiple unrelated workloads, core foundation managed: turnkey VDC.
Multiple unrelated workloads, application stack managed: cloud-enabled data center
outsourcing.
This Magic Quadrant represents only a portion of the market. The four segments of this market,
and their use cases, represented by this Magic Quadrant are:
Scale-out cloud hosting. These customers typically have a website or Web application that
they seek to run on dynamically scalable infrastructure. E-marketing sites (especially
marketing microsites), SaaS enablement (that is, a software company sourcing infrastructure
on which it will host its SaaS offering) and Microsoft SharePoint hosting are common use
cases. Technology startups may be wholly dependent on scale-out cloud hosting to run their
customer-facing infrastructure. These applications often have cloud-native architectures.
Virtual lab environment. These customers typically try to provide self-service infrastructure to
a group of technical users, such as developers, scientists or engineers, for the purposes of
test and development, or scientific computing or other batch computing. (See "Virtual Lab
Automation: The Foundation for Private Cloud Infrastructure Service Delivery" for a guide to
evaluating test and development environments; it covers both public and private cloud IaaS.
See "How Cloud Computing Relates to Grid Computing" for details of batch computing on
public cloud IaaS.)
EVIDENCE
Gartner client inquiries in 2011 and 2012.
Service provider interviews and product
demonstrations in 2012.
Surveys of more than 60 cloud IaaS providers
in 2012.
Customer references from the service
providers in 2012.
Hands-on trials of service offerings in 2012.
Public information, such as U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission filings, press releases,
vendor websites and community support
forums.
EVALUATION CRITERIA DEFINITIONS
Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services
offered by the vendor that compete in/serve the
defined market. This includes current
product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets,
skills and so on, whether offered natively or
through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined
in the market definition and detailed in the
subcriteria.
Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial,
Strategy, Organization): Viability includes an
assessment of the overall organization's financial
health, the financial and practical success of the
business unit, and the likelihood that the
individual business unit will continue investing in
the product, will continue offering the product and
will advance the state of the art within the
organization's portfolio of products.
Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities
in all presales activities and the structure that
supports them. This includes deal management,
pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the
overall effectiveness of the sales channel.
Market Responsiveness and Track Record: Ability
to respond, change direction, be flexible and
achieve competitive success as opportunities
develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve
and market dynamics change. This criterion also
considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.
Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality,
creativity and efficacy of programs designed to
deliver the organization's message to influence
the market, promote the brand and business,
increase awareness of the products, and establish
a positive identification with the product/brand
and organization in the minds of buyers. This
"mind share" can be driven by a combination of
publicity, promotional initiatives, thought
leadership, word-of-mouth and sales activities.
Customer Experience: Relationships, products
and services/programs that enable clients to be
successful with the products evaluated.
Specifically, this includes the ways customers
receive technical support or account support. This
can also include ancillary tools, customer support
programs (and the quality thereof), availability of
user groups, service-level agreements and so on.
Operations: The ability of the organization to
meet its goals and commitments. Factors include
the quality of the organizational structure,
including skills, experiences, programs, systems
and other vehicles that enable the organization to
operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing
basis.
Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to
understand buyers' wants and needs and to
translate those into products and services.
Vendors that show the highest degree of vision
listen and understand buyers' wants and needs,
and can shape or enhance those with their added
vision.
Page 2
28/08/2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1CKSZ0E&ct=121022&st=sg 2/17
Self-managed VDC. These customers seek self-provisioned, self-managed and cost-effective
infrastructure as an alternative to buying their own equipment, virtualizing it and placing it
into co-location or into their own data center. These customers typically begin by running a
variety of non-mission-critical business applications within the VDC, but may eventually
intend to move as many workloads as possible into the VDC.
Turnkey VDC. These customers seek all the capabilities of a self-managed VDC, but want
someone else to be responsible for securing that infrastructure and handling routine, non-
value-added operations. Usually, they want management through the OS level, including OS
patch management, and often want managed security services as well. Many of these
management functions can be partially, if not fully, automated; at present, they generally
require some human intervention by the service provider, but we expect them to become
fully automated in the future. These customers do not want to give up control, and they view
these functions as things that simply ought to be part of the service — they accept people
performing these functions as a temporary substitute for automation. These customers
typically run a variety of business applications, some or all of which may be mission-critical;
they may eventually intend for cloud IaaS, in conjunction with co-location, to replace their
existing data center infrastructure entirely.
This Magic Quadrant strongly emphasizes self-service and automation in a standardized
environment. It is focused on the needs of customers whose primary need is self-service cloud
IaaS, although it may be supplemented by a small amount of co-location or dedicated servers.
Organizations that need significant customization or managed services for a single application, or
which are seeking cloud IaaS as a supplement to a traditional hosting solution ("hybrid hosting"),
should see "Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting" instead. Organizations that do not want to
self-service, but that rather want to use underlying cloud-enabled system infrastructure, should
consult our Magic Quadrants for data center outsourcing and infrastructure utility services instead
(published regionally for North America and Europe).
This Magic Quadrant evaluates only solutions that are delivered in an entirely standardized
fashion — specifically, public cloud IaaS, along with private cloud IaaS that leverages the same or
highly similar platform. While the providers in this Magic Quadrant do offer custom private cloud
IaaS, we have not considered these offerings in our evaluations. Organizations that are looking
for custom-built, custom-managed private clouds should use our Magic Quadrants for data center
outsourcing and infrastructure utility services instead (see above).
Understanding the Vendor Profiles, Strengths and Cautions
IaaS providers that target enterprise and midmarket customers generally offer a high-quality
service, with excellent availability, good performance, high security and good customer support.
Exceptions to this will be noted in this Magic Quadrant's evaluations of individual providers. Keep
the following in mind when reading the vendor profiles:
Most of the evaluated providers are oriented toward the needs of traditional IT operations,
with an emphasis on control, governance and security, and the ability to run both new
applications and legacy workloads. The providers that are oriented toward the needs of
developers are noted as such; these providers typically emphasize easy access to
infrastructure for individuals who are building new applications.
Most of the providers evaluated have a "reliable cloud," achieved through redundant
infrastructure in conjunction with virtual machine (VM) clustering; they are thus able to offer
a very high SLA for infrastructure availability — often as high as 99.999% (sometimes
expressed as a 100% SLA with a 10-minute exclusion). Offerings without VM clustering or an
equivalent technology that provides higher levels of infrastructure availability than can be
expected from a single physical server are referred to as "best-effort cloud." In general,
monthly availability SLAs of 99.95% and higher are the norm, and are typically higher than
availability SLAs for managed hosting. Service credits for outages in a given month typically
cap at 100% of the monthly bill. This availability percentage is typically non-negotiable, as it
is based on an engineering estimate of the underlying infrastructure reliability.
Very few of the providers in this Magic Quadrant have an SLA for compute or storage
performance. However, most of the providers do not oversubscribe compute or RAM
resources; providers that do not guarantee resource allocations are noted explicitly. Storage
performance varies considerably between providers.
Many providers have additional SLAs, covering network availability and performance,
customer service responsiveness and other service aspects.
Infrastructure resources are not normally automatically replicated into multiple data centers
unless otherwise noted; customers are responsible for their own business continuity. Some
providers offer optional disaster recovery solutions.
Most of the providers offer either a shared resource pool (SRP) pricing model or are flexible
on how they price the service. In the SRP model, customers contract for a certain amount of
capacity (in terms of CPU and RAM), but can allocate that capacity to VMs in an arbitrary way,
including being able to oversubscribe that capacity voluntarily; additional capacity can usually
be purchased on demand by the hour. Providers that are paid by the VM, rather than on an
SRP model, are noted as such. All the providers offer per-hour metering.
Most of the providers allow customers to choose arbitrary-size VMs — any combination of
vCPUs, RAM and VM storage, subject to some limits. Providers that do not allow this are
explicitly noted as offering fixed-size VMs.
Most of the providers are able to offer an option for single-tenant VMs within a public cloud
IaaS offering, on a fully dynamic basis, where a customer can choose to place a VM on a host
that is temporarily physically dedicated to just that customer. These VMs are typically more
expensive than VMs on shared hosts. Providers that do not have this option are noted as
such.
Some of the providers are able to offer "bare metal" physical servers on a dynamic basis.
Due to the longer provisioning times involved for physical equipment (two hours is common),
the minimum billing increment for such servers is usually daily, rather than hourly.
All the providers offer an option for co-location, unless otherwise noted. Many customers
have needs that require a small amount of supplemental co-location in conjunction with their
cloud — most frequently for a large-scale database, but sometimes for specialized network
equipment, software that cannot be licensed on virtualized servers, or legacy equipment.
Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of
messages consistently communicated throughout
the organization and externalized through the
website, advertising, customer programs and
positioning statements.
Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products
that uses the appropriate network of direct and
indirect sales, marketing, service, and
communication affiliates that extend the scope
and depth of market reach, skills, expertise,
technologies, services and the customer base.
Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's
approach to product development and delivery
that emphasizes differentiation, functionality,
methodology and feature sets as they map to
current and future requirements.
Business Model: The soundness and logic of the
vendor's underlying business proposition.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's
strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to
meet the specific needs of individual market
segments, including vertical markets.
Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and
synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or
capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or
pre-emptive purposes.
Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to
direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the
specific needs of geographies outside the "home"
or native geography, either directly or through
partners, channels and subsidiaries as
appropriate for that geography and market.
Page 3
28/08/2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1CKSZ0E&ct=121022&st=sg 3/17
Co-location is specifically mentioned only when a service provider actively sells co-location as
a stand-alone service; a significant number of midmarket customers plan to move into co-
location and then gradually migrate into that provider's IaaS offering.
Most of the providers offer optional managed services on IaaS. However, not all offer the
same type of managed services on IaaS as they do in their broader managed hosting or
data center outsourcing services. Some may have managed services provider (MSP) or
system integrator (SI) partners that provide managed and professional services.
All of the providers have a public cloud IaaS offering. Many also have a "cookie cutter"
private cloud offering, where every customer is on standardized infrastructure and cloud
management tools, although this might or might not resemble the provider's public cloud
service in either architecture or quality. A single architecture, feature set and cross-cloud
management, for both public and private cloud IaaS, make it easier for customers to combine
and migrate across service models as their needs dictate, and allows the provider to
leverage its engineering investments more effectively. All of the providers also offer custom
private clouds unless otherwise noted.
All the providers offer an option for private network connectivity (usually in the form of
Multiprotocol Label Switching [MPLS] or Ethernet purchased from the customer's choice of
carrier), unless otherwise noted. Most of the providers support the use of Internet-based
IPsec VPN. All the providers allow customers to have VMs with only private Internet Protocol
(IP) addresses (no public Internet connectivity), and also allow customers to use their own
IP address ranges, unless otherwise noted. Some providers may enforce secure access to
management consoles, restricting access to VPNs or private connectivity.
All the providers evaluated claim to have high security standards. The extent of the security
controls provided to customers varies significantly, though. Most providers offer a firewall
(intrusion detection system/intrusion prevention system) as part of their offering, although a
few offer only access control lists (ACLs) and a few offer no self-service network security at
all. Most providers offer additional security services. All of the providers evaluated can offer
solutions that will meet common regulatory compliance needs, unless otherwise noted.
All the providers allow customers to bring their own VM images, unless otherwise noted. This
allows a customer to create snapshots of existing VMs within their own internal data center,
and then directly import them into the provider's cloud, rather than having to start from the
provider's own VM image library. This also allows the import of VM appliances and other
prepackaged VM images from independent software vendors (ISVs).
Very few of the providers offer availability and performance monitoring, visible in their
customer portal, as part of their self-service IaaS offering. Some providers may offer
monitoring as an option, and many will include it with a hybrid hosting or other managed
services offering.
All the providers evaluated offer a portal and self-service mechanism that is designed for
multiple users and that offers hierarchical administration and role-based access control
(RBAC). However, the degree of RBAC granularity varies greatly. We strongly recommend
that customers that need these features, but want to use a provider that doesn't have
strong support for them, evaluate a third-party management tool, such as RightScale or
enStratus.
We consider enterprise-class support to require 24/7 customer service, via phone and email,
along with an account manager. Most providers include this with their offering. Some offer a
lower level support by default, but allow customers to pay extra for enterprise-class support.
All the providers evaluated will sign contracts with customers and can invoice; while some
may also offer online sign-up and credit card billing, they recognize that enterprise buyers
prefer contracts and invoices. Some will sign "zero dollar" contracts that do not commit a
customer to a certain volume.
All the providers evaluated are believed to be financially stable, with business plans that are
adequately funded. Customers should not need to worry about them going out of business.
However, many of the smaller providers are likely to be potential acquisition targets; an
acquisition can cause significant changes in the strategy and direction of a business, and
may result in a service transition period if the merged companies consolidate their platforms.
Many of the providers have white-label or reseller programs, and some may be willing to
license their software. We mention software licensing only when it is a significant portion of
the provider's business; other service providers, not enterprises, are usually the licensees.
We do not mention channel programs; potential partners should simply assume that all
these companies are open to discussing a relationship. (See "Infrastructure as a Service in
the Cloud Services Value Chain" for details.)
Format of the Provider Descriptions
When describing the providers, we briefly summarize the nature of the company, where the data
centers that host their cloud IaaS offerings are located, and their range of service offerings. We
specifically note other cloud-related services, such as cloud storage, as well as the availability of
managed services, even though those service offerings are not specifically evaluated in the
context of this Magic Quadrant, because they are capabilities frequently requested by customers
in conjunction with cloud IaaS. (See "Market Insight: Customers Need Hybrid Cloud Compute
Infrastructure as a Service" for details.)
We also state the basis of every provider's virtualization technology and, if relevant, their cloud
management platform (CMP). For many customers, the underlying hypervisor will matter,
particularly for customers that intend to run commercial software on IaaS. Many ISVs support only
VMware virtualization, and those vendors that support Xen may support only Citrix XenServer, not
open-source Xen (which is often customized by IaaS providers and is likely to be different from
the current open-source version).
Services that use VMware's virtualization technologies are labeled as follows:
vCloud Datacenter Service. This service has been certified to meet VMware's globally
consistent service definitions, security and regulatory compliance requirements, and
requirements for availability and high performance. It is based on a prescriptive architecture
intended to maximize portability between providers of vCloud Datacenter Service and a
business's own VMware-virtualized data center infrastructure. Only eight providers
Page 4
28/08/2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1CKSZ0E&ct=121022&st=sg 4/17
worldwide have such a service and several of them do not yet have a significant customer
base on this platform. These providers also meet the requirements for being vCloud
Powered.
vCloud Powered. These providers are part of VMware's service provider partner program. The
service is based on VMware's vSphere and vCloud Director (vCD), exposes the vCloud API,
and supports the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) for image upload and download. Unless
otherwise stated, these providers expose the vCD UI to customers. Because the vCD
features exposed can be customized by the service provider, and the service provider
typically needs to provide an array of features not included in vCD (such as monitoring),
there is still significant differentiation between vCloud Powered providers. In a vCloud
Powered offering with the vCD UI exposed, vCD is used to drive self-service management
and provide a service catalog. vCD is a key part of VMware's strategy for driving adoption of
hybrid internal-external cloud IaaS, and facilitates interoperability between VMware-
virtualized infrastructures, regardless of whether they are internal to a business or offered
by a service provider. vCD provides the capability to manage very complex infrastructure
needs, but also requires a greater investment in training and setup time from an IT
administrator in order to facilitate easier self-service for users.
vCloud Express. vCloud Express is a VMware-defined offering targeted at developers and
small businesses, with online sign-up, credit card payment, self-service and by-the-hour
service.
VMware-virtualized. This service uses VMware's hypervisor, but is not a vCloud Datacenter,
vCloud Powered or vCloud Express service. Many such offerings are high-quality services
from early, market-leading innovators; these providers typically entered the market before
vCD became available and have elected to continue to develop their own technology.
Recommended Uses
For each vendor, we also provide a recommendation for use. The most typical recommended uses
are:
Cloud-native applications. These are applications that are specifically architected to run in a
cloud IaaS environment, using cloud transaction processing (TP) principles.
E-business hosting. These are e-marketing sites, e-commerce sites, SaaS applications, and
similar modern websites and Web-based applications. They are usually Internet facing. They
are designed to scale out and are resilient to infrastructure failure, but they might not use
cloud TP principles.
General business applications. These are the kinds of general-purpose workloads typically
found in the internal data centers of most traditional businesses; the application users are
usually located within the business. Many such workloads are small, and they are often not
designed to scale out. They are usually architected with the assumption that the underlying
infrastructure is reliable, but they are not necessarily mission-critical. Examples include
intranet sites, collaboration applications such as Microsoft SharePoint, and many business
process applications.
Enterprise applications. These are general-purpose workloads that are mission-critical, and
may be complex, performance-sensitive or contain highly sensitive data; they are typical of a
modest percentage of the workloads found in the internal data centers of most traditional
businesses. They are usually not designed to scale out, and the workloads may demand
large VM sizes. They are architected with the assumption that the underlying infrastructure is
reliable and high-performance.
Test and development. These workloads are related to the development and testing of
applications. They are assumed not to require high availability or high performance.
Batch computing. These workloads include high-performance computing (HPC), "big data"
analytics and other workloads that require large amounts of capacity on demand. They do
not require high availability, but may require high performance.
In the case of all vendors, the recommended use is specific to the four market segments
evaluated within this Magic Quadrant — scale-out cloud hosting, virtual lab environment, self-
managed VDC and turnkey VDC. This means that even if a provider excels in one aspect of a
nonevaluated segment, such as complex managed cloud hosting, this will not be mentioned as a
recommended use. We may mention hybrid hosting as a recommended use, however, as
customers may blend solutions (for instance, an entirely self-managed front-end Web tier on
public cloud IaaS, but managed hosting for the application servers and database), even though
hybrid hosting is often primarily a complex managed cloud hosting use case.
Return to Top
Magic Quadrant
Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
Page 5
28/08/2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1CKSZ0E&ct=121022&st=sg 5/17
Source: Gartner (October 2012)
Return to Top
Vendor Strengths and Cautions
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud-focused service provider with a very pure vision of highly
automated, cost-effective IT capabilities, bought without any need to commit to a contract. Its
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a fixed-size, paid-by-the-VM, Xen-virtualized, public cloud IaaS. It
has groups of data centers, which it calls "regions," in the U.S., Brazil, Ireland, Japan and
Singapore, along with one region that is dedicated to the U.S. federal government. It also offers
object-based storage with an integrated content delivery network (CDN), Hadoop as a service,
database as a service, and a number of PaaS-like services. It does not have any private cloud
offerings. It does not offer co-location, but customers can cross-connect in the data centers of
select partners (notably Equinix).
Strengths
AWS is the market share leader, and a thought leader; it is extraordinarily innovative,
exceptionally agile and very responsive to the market. It has the richest IaaS product
portfolio, and is constantly expanding its service offerings and reducing its prices.
AWS has by far the largest pool of capacity, which makes it one of the few infrastructures
suitable for batch computing, especially those workloads that require short-term provisioning
of hundreds of servers at a time. AWS also offers specialized infrastructure options for high-
performance computing and big data applications, along with a "spot pricing" market for
compute capacity.
AWS has a very large technology partner ecosystem. Many software vendors have specially
licensed and packaged their software to run on EC2, either independently or via the AWS
Marketplace, easing deployment and eliminating some of the challenges associated with
licensing software to run in the cloud. Its API is supported by many third parties that provide
associate management tools, and many open-source and commercial CMPs are compatible
with its API.
AWS has been aggressively expanding its targeting of enterprises. It has been doing so by
both broadening its technical capabilities and increasing its go-to-market partnerships with
system integrators. It has obtained many security and compliance-related certifications and
audits. Customers may be able to access these audits under a nondisclosure agreement, but
cannot conduct their own independent audits.
AWS has multiple "availability zones" (AZs) within its regions. These AZs are effectively
multiple data centers in close proximity to one another. Its services are designed to make it
easier to run applications across multiple AZs; customers are responsible for architecting
their applications for high availability. However, new capabilities are rolled out region-by-
region, so not all regions have identical capabilities.
Recommended uses: Cloud-native applications, batch computing, e-business hosting, general
business applications, and test and development.
Cautions
AWS is a best-effort cloud. Its weak, narrowly defined SLA requires that the customer runs
workloads in at least two AZs within a region; a violation requires that connectivity to both
AZs be unavailable. The SLA does not include Elastic Block Store (known as EBS), which most
customers use for persistent storage. However, unlike most other providers, AWS does not
have any SLA exclusions for maintenance windows, and it offers continuous availability on its
Page 6
28/08/2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1CKSZ0E&ct=121022&st=sg 6/17
portal and API.
AWS is a price leader, but it charges separately for optional items that are often bundled
with competitive offerings, including enterprise-grade support. Prospective customers should
be careful to model the costs accurately, especially network-related charges, to normalize
comparative costs based on actual compute performance, and to compare the costs of
reserved and unreserved capacity.
AWS does not offer any managed services, although they are available through MSP
partners (such as Datapipe) and SIs (such as Capgemini, Wipro and Cognizant). As it
expands its service portfolio, it is adding offerings that automate some aspects of
infrastructure management, such as its Relational Database Service.
AWS has a field sales and solutions engineering organization, but it does not consistently
satisfy prospects that need consultative sales. For better terms and conditions, customers
should sign an Enterprise Agreement, which is typically a zero-dollar contract. Invoicing is
available on request, but AWS's billing reports are difficult to understand and audit.
Return to Top
Bluelock
Bluelock is a small, independent cloud-IaaS-focused provider that targets the midmarket and
enterprise markets. It offers a vCloud Datacenter Service for both public and private cloud IaaS,
with optional managed services. Its data centers are located in the U.S.
Strengths
Bluelock has a track record of successfully serving production use cases, including complex
and mission-critical needs. It is one of VMware's closest service provider partners, and is
usually one of the first service providers to implement new VMware products and version
upgrades.
Bluelock has strong multicloud capabilities. In addition to supporting vCloud Connector, it
also supports vCloud Global Connect, which allows federation between participating vCloud
Datacenter Service providers.
Bluelock offers two tiers of service, a "5-series" aimed at production workloads, and a "2-
series" aimed at development workloads; the latter uses oversubscription and has a lower
SLA.
Bluelock has a tool in its portal called Portfolio, which provides monitoring and is focused on
IT financial management of IaaS resources, helping customers to understand where they are
spending money and how they can optimize their resource usage.
Recommended uses: E-business hosting, general business applications, enterprise
applications, and test and development.
Cautions
Bluelock is a small provider and, while it is financially stable, its size and excellence of service
make it a prime target for acquisition.
Bluelock is trying to compete with much larger vendors, but its more limited engineering
resources mean that it has little margin for error in execution if it wants to keep up its pace
of innovation.
Bluelock has concentrated on quickly delivering VMware's technologies and services and its
road map continues this pattern. It is highly dependent on VMware's release cycles and
technological innovation.
Bluelock's data centers are in Indianapolis, Indiana, and Salt Lake City, Utah, which are not
major network hub cities. This impacts Internet performance, and does not offer the breadth
and depth of connectivity options available at major carrier-neutral exchange points.
Return to Top
CSC
CSC is a large, traditional IT outsourcer with a broad range of data center outsourcing
capabilities. It offers a vCloud Datacenter Service, a VCE Vblock-based cloud IaaS architecture in
three variants — public multitenant in a CSC data center (CloudCompute), and private single-
tenant in a CSC data center or in the customer's own data center (BizCloud) — and optional
managed services. It offers both paid-by-the-VM and SRP pricing. API access is only offered in
BizCloud. CSC has multiple cloud data centers in the U.S., as well as in Australia, Canada,
Germany, Luxembourg, Singapore, Switzerland and the U.K.
Strengths
CSC is one of the few providers to have a standardized architecture across both public and
private cloud offerings, as well as a single rate card across all of these offerings — while the
pricing is the same, the minimum commitments vary.
Contrary to most other traditional data center outsourcers, CSC has fully embraced the
highly standardized, highly automated cloud model, successfully blending the benefits of a
true cloud service into an enterprise-ready offering. It has a strong road map focused on
bringing enterprise-class IT operations management tools, including automated managed
services, to cloud IaaS. It is also building infrastructure utility services for specific applications
on top of the platform.
CSC has developed a portfolio of cloud-related professional services, including Smart Start, a
proof-of-concept program intended to help a customer achieve a "quick win" in moving an
application onto IaaS, and then methodically migrating other workloads over time. In
general, it is generous about offering trials to prospective customers.
Recommended uses: General business applications, test and development, cloud-enabled
data center transformation, and transition.
Cautions
Cloud computing is driving a radical reinvention of the way that CSC delivers services,
Page 7
28/08/2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1CKSZ0E&ct=121022&st=sg 7/17
including significantly broadening the range of companies that CSC targets with its offerings.
The cloud division is run as its own business unit, which gives it greater agility but also
sometimes brings it into conflict with its slower-moving and more conservative parent
company. CSC's drive and innovation in this market might be diluted by interference from
other parts of the company, and it can be impacted by the challenges facing CSC as an
overall corporation.
While CSC's road map is ambitious, and it has done an excellent job of quickly delivering a
successful competitive cloud IaaS offering, it is only just beginning to launch its offerings for
automated IT operations management.
CloudCompute is a best-effort cloud, without VM HA. Capabilities are introduced into
BizCloud first, before being later rolled out into CloudCompute, so CloudCompute offers a
subset of the BizCloud features.
Return to Top
Dell
Dell is a large diversified technology company. It offers a vCloud Datacenter Service for public
cloud IaaS in both pay-by-the-VM and SRP pricing models, as well as a VMware-virtualized
"Dedicated Cloud" solution with single-tenant compute, from data centers in the U.S. and the U.K.
Strengths
Dell has a realistic, logical strategy of building integration between its hardware platforms
and its cloud offerings over time. These are planned integrations, however, and Dell has yet
to establish a track record in this regard. Since Dell has a hardware business, it potentially
has a lower cost base for some hardware components that power its cloud services.
Dell has a very large sales force, with global reach, along with well-established channels. It
has been very successful at signing up customers for its platform, although it must still prove
that it can retain and grow those customers beyond their initial pilot deployment.
Recommended uses: Test and development and pilot projects for existing Dell hardware
customers.
Cautions
Dell is a very recent entrant to the market, and it has not yet established a track record. Its
public cloud IaaS offering contains a minimal feature set, and it is missing traits that are
critical to enterprise customers, such as the ability to meet compliance requirements and the
ability to use customer-provided IP addresses. It oversubscribes its infrastructure. Its road
map for service enhancements is weak.
Dell does not seem to have settled on a cloud IaaS platform strategy. Its current approach
divides the needs of typical existing business workloads from the needs of new applications,
with different architectures, CMPs and offerings for each, rather than moving toward the
single integrated offering that enterprises desire.
Dell entered the data center outsourcing business via its acquisition of Perot Systems, and
its broader cloud strategy cuts across the company. However, self-service cloud offerings are
primarily being driven out of Dell proper, which has less experience with recurring-revenue
services. Dell's cloud support organization and related back-office systems are nascent.
Return to Top
Dimension Data
Dimension Data is a large system integrator and value-added reseller. It entered the cloud IaaS
market through the 2011 acquisition of OpSource. It offers VMware-virtualized paid-by-the-VM
public cloud IaaS, as well as SRP-priced private cloud IaaS, with optional managed services, from
data centers in the U.S., Australia, the Netherlands and South Africa. It does not have a single-
tenant VM option in its public cloud. It does not offer any co-location, but it does have cross-
connect options for customers who want to connect to a co-location provider.
Strengths
Dimension Data's offering is designed to compete against best-effort cloud IaaS offerings,
with very aggressive prices. However, it is a reliable cloud, and has excellent SLAs, including
100% availability. In addition to its own API, it offers AWS API compatibility.
Dimension Data's Managed Cloud Platform (MCP) is a single unified architecture across its
public and private cloud offerings — one of the few providers to provide such an architecture.
The MCP is also offered via resale and white-label. Dimension Data can enable federation
across MCP clouds.
Dimension Data has launched Cloud Software, a set of partnerships with ISVs. It offers
Dimension Data-tested and -licensed software from those ISVs, on demand. Depending on
the software, the price may be hourly or monthly.
OpSource had a long history as a SaaS hoster, and Dimension Data has retained these
capabilities. Its rich suite of offerings for that market includes not only infrastructure, but also
an on-demand billing platform, custom application management and help desk support.
Recommended uses: E-business hosting, cloud-native applications, general business
applications, and test and development.
Cautions
Dimension Data is still integrating OpSource into its overall portfolio. Although this
integration is mostly complete, and we do not foresee any business disruptions as a result,
there are still business risks, particularly as Dimension Data phases out the OpSource brand.
At the moment, the OpSource and Dimension Data brands are used inconsistently
throughout the customer experience.
While Dimension Data's offering is VMware-virtualized, it is not vCloud Powered. Instead,
Dimension Data is doing extensive software development of its own, allowing it to drive a
faster pace of innovation and better control it costs. Although it is able to invest in the
Page 8
28/08/2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1CKSZ0E&ct=121022&st=sg 8/17
necessary engineering resources, this also represents a new way of doing business for
Dimension Data, which has historically been an integrator of technology, not a developer of
technology.
Dimension Data is owned by NTT Group. While NTT has deliberately chosen Dimension Data
to be its most agile business, with minimal interference from the parent, Dimension Data's
future ability to move quickly is likely to depend on continued non-interference.
Return to Top
Fujitsu
Fujitsu is a large diversified technology company. It has many cloud platforms, including Fujitsu
Global Cloud Platform (FGCP), multiple local cloud platforms (FLCPs) based on a reference
architecture, and multiple private cloud offerings. FGCP is a paid-by-the-VM, Xen-virtualized, public
cloud IaaS, offered in data centers in Japan, Australia, Germany, Singapore, the U.K. and the U.S.
Individual FLCP regions have different capabilities. Managed services are optional. Although
Fujitsu has received vCloud Datacenter Service Provider partner status, it has not yet launched
this offering.
Strengths
Fujitsu has a long history in IT services and data center outsourcing. It has a large global
sales force, is the leader in IT outsourcing in Asia/Pacific and has a strong European
presence. This gives it a large existing base of captive customers into which it can sell cloud
services, and it is successful at extending existing Fujitsu relationships into cloud deals. It
has very responsive support, and good account management.
Fujitsu is a global vendor of hardware and software, and consequently could have a lower
cost base for many hardware components, when compared to most other cloud providers.
Fujitsu's strategy of allowing its regions to pursue their own cloud strategies has enabled
certain regions, such as Australia, to develop offerings tailored to the needs of the local
market, at a faster pace than Fujitsu has been able to do so as a global entity.
Fujitsu rolls out FGCP features first in Japan, then extends them to its other regions.
Furthermore, Fujitsu in Japan offers additional cloud capabilities — Japan-based
organizations or projects targeted at the Japanese market should investigate what
capabilities are specifically available in Japan, such as object-based storage, database as a
service, and Hadoop as a service.
Recommended uses: General business applications, and test and development.
Cautions
The FGCP is missing some features that are important to customers, such as the ability to
have single-tenant VMs, virtual console access to VMs and the option to bring your own VM
images. Users are likely to find its portal UI to be non-intuitive, and its provisioning times are
lengthy compared to other providers. It cannot meet common compliance requirements.
Fujitsu's strategy of allowing regional control means that development efforts are
fragmented across the globe. As such, service offerings may differ in each region, making it
difficult for Fujitsu to fully leverage engineering resources and to achieve economies of scale,
although Fujitsu has recently strengthened its global cloud strategy and management.
Fujitsu is developing much of its own technology, and thus will be challenged to maintain a
competitive level of engineering investment and pace of development. We believe that its
global strategy is primarily focused on leveraging its cloud IaaS platforms to win managed
services business, although it is also pursuing the self-service business.
Return to Top
GoGrid
GoGrid is a small, independent cloud-IaaS-focused provider. It offers fixed-size, paid-by-the-VM,
Xen-virtualized IaaS as both public cloud and private cloud, with optional managed services, in
data centers in the U.S. and the Netherlands.
Strengths
GoGrid is among the top five public cloud IaaS providers by VM count. Although it has a
competitively priced, best-effort, developer-centric IaaS offering, it has excellent SLAs that
include 100% availability. It is one of the few providers that has a standard architecture
across its public and private cloud offerings.
The GoGrid Exchange allows software vendors to license and package their software to run
on GoGrid, easing deployment and eliminating some of the headaches associated with
licensing software to run in the cloud. It has a unique multipartner compensation model,
allowing partners to build on top of each other's software stacks.
Recommended uses: Cloud-native applications, e-business hosting, and test and
development for individuals or small teams.
Cautions
GoGrid's software is developed entirely in-house. This allows it to innovate quickly and to
drive down its costs, but also provides significant long-term challenges in competing against
providers that can devote significant resources to R&D.
GoGrid's offering lacks some features that are important to enterprise users, such as
granular RBAC, single-tenant VMs within the public cloud, the ability to use customer-
provided IP addresses, and the option to bring your own VM images.
GoGrid has its own API, which is supported by a limited number of third-party tools. GoGrid is
pursuing a strategy of broader interoperability, and its future success will be dependent on
ensuring that it can partake in one or more of the emerging platform ecosystems.
Return to Top
Page 9
28/08/2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1CKSZ0E&ct=121022&st=sg 9/17
Joyent
Joyent is a small, independent service provider that is solely focused on cloud services. It offers
fixed-size, paid-by-the-VM public and private cloud IaaS, using KVM. Its data centers are located
in the U.S. and the Netherlands.
Strengths
Joyent places strong emphasis on application performance and it takes a holistic approach to
its delivery, including integrating network-based acceleration. It has particularly deep portal-
based performance analytics, using the DTrace framework for application instrumentation.
Joyent has a unique vision for cloud IaaS and is highly innovative from a technology
perspective. It is developing an integrated technology stack and its infrastructure offerings
verge into the platform space. It is making deep investments in fundamental technologies,
including its own SmartOS operating system, based on Illumos (which is derived from
Solaris). Joyent's cloud uses Solaris Containers. KVM runs natively within a container, thus
providing additional security, resource control and resource visibility within the virtualization
layer.
Joyent has a pure focus on new, cloud-native applications, including mobile applications.
Joyent is one of the top five public cloud IaaS providers by VM count. It has a strategy of
international expansion that targets emerging markets with innovative developer
ecosystems. It is the sponsor of Node.js, and it offers proprietary tools focused on Node.js
operations within its platform.
Joyent intends to derive its future revenue from a mix of offering cloud services directly and
selling its SmartDataCenter software (including via OEM partners such as Dell). It has
launched its Global Compute Network, a cloud federation alliance focused on mobile carriers;
its strategic carrier partners include Telefonica and Bharti Airtel.
Recommended use: Cloud-native applications where visibility into application performance is
crucial.
Cautions
Joyent's feature set is oriented solely toward the hosting use case. It is a best-effort cloud,
and it is highly developer-centric. It emphasizes API capabilities and the enablement of third-
party tools, rather than portal capabilities of its own. It has a single-account model, and
depends on a partnership with enStratus to provide granular RBAC.
The unique nature of Joyent's offering makes it particularly critical for Joyent to develop an
ecosystem around its platform; it must attract ISVs and third-party tools vendors, along with
MSPs and SIs that can provide managed and professional services.
Joyent is focused on developing its own technology, which creates long-term challenges in
competing against providers with greater development resources. That said, it has chosen to
focus its efforts in particular areas, leaving certain capabilities, notably enterprise
management features, to partners such as enStratus.
Return to Top
OVH
OVH is an independent Web hoster with a focus on small or midsize businesses (SMBs). It offers
paid-by-the-VM, VMware-virtualized public cloud IaaS, as well as a vCloud Datacenter Service for
private cloud IaaS, with optional managed services, from data centers in France and Canada. It
also offers object-based storage.
Strengths
OVH emphasizes self-service and a high degree of automation. It is one of the largest
European cloud IaaS providers, by VM count. It has localized its site and documentation for a
broad range of European languages.
OVH's private cloud IaaS offering is particularly innovative. The offering can be set up within
30 minutes, and it allows customers to dynamically add and subtract hardware from their
capacity pool with hourly billing and provisioning times of under five minutes, thus offering
economics and flexibility comparable to public cloud in a single-tenant environment.
Customers have a choice between vCloud Director and OVH's own, more user-friendly portal.
Recommended uses: General business applications, e-business hosting, and test and
development.
Cautions
OVH primarily targets SMBs, although it does have customers of significant size. Customers
using OVH cloud services should strongly consider OVH's "VIP Support" option, which
provides priority support and a dedicated account manager.
OVH's cloud presence is heavily concentrated in a limited data center footprint. It has also
just launched its Canadian data center.
OVH cannot support common compliance requirements. Its public cloud cannot support
complex network topologies, VMs that only have a private IP address, or customer-provided
IP addresses, although these capabilities exist in its private cloud.
Return to Top
Rackspace
Rackspace is an independent Web hoster with a long track record of leadership in the managed
hosting market. It offers a fixed-size, paid-by-the-VM, Xen-virtualized public cloud IaaS (Cloud
Servers), with optional managed services, from data centers in the U.S. and the U.K. It also offers
object-based storage (Cloud Files) with an integrated CDN (via a partnership with Akamai),
database as a service, and cloud PaaS (Cloud Sites). It is a founder and the initial primary
sponsor of OpenStack, an open-source cloud management platform, and its Cloud Builders
business provides traditional commercial open-source support and professional services around it.
Page 10
28/08/2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1CKSZ0E&ct=121022&st=sg 10/17
Strengths
OpenStack's broad community of participating vendors is likely to make it a key cloud
infrastructure ecosystem, in competition with VMware, Microsoft and Amazon. It should
eventually allow Rackspace to introduce service enhancements at an improved pace and
expand third-party management tools support. Rackspace intends to use OpenStack to
enable it to offer hybrid clouds to customers who want OpenStack both in their internal data
centers and in Rackspace data centers.
Rackspace Cloud Servers is an easy-to-use service with a basic feature set, and excellent
customer support. It has one of the lowest entry price points, making it attractive for initial
experimentation with cloud IaaS.
Rackspace has a large base of existing managed hosting customers that it can sell cloud
into. Although most such customers currently opt for VMware-virtualized dedicated servers
rather than using Cloud Servers, and Rackspace does not offer the full range of its managed
services on Cloud Servers, the RackConnect hybrid offering may nevertheless be attractive
to cost-sensitive customers.
Recommended uses: Hybrid hosting where cloud IaaS is supplementary to a primarily
dedicated infrastructure; and test and development for individual developers and small
teams, where simplicity and ease of use are critical attributes.
Cautions
OpenStack is an emerging technology whose future direction is still uncertain. Rackspace
recently relinquished most of its control over the project by launching the independent
OpenStack Foundation (of which it remains a platinum sponsor). OpenStack's evolution may
not necessarily align closely with Rackspace's needs — it is possible that OpenStack could be
successful without it leading to Rackspace's success.
Rackspace Cloud Servers is a developer-centric, best-effort IaaS. While it has the second-
largest market share in public cloud IaaS, it has appealed primarily to small businesses
seeking a replacement for low-cost mass-market hosting. It is missing many features that
are part of the offerings of most of the evaluated providers, and which are vital for many
enterprise use cases. For instance, it cannot support customer-provided IP addresses,
granular RBAC, single-tenant VMs, or the ability to import a customer's own VM images.
Rackspace is currently in a transitional stage, running two public cloud IaaS technology
platforms simultaneously — the previous proprietary Cloud Servers platform and the new
OpenStack-based platform launched in August 2012. Some features are only available on
one of those platforms. Rackspace's pace of new feature introduction has accelerated
significantly since the new platform's launch. Existing Cloud Servers customers will eventually
need to migrate to the new OpenStack offering.
Rackspace has a diverse set of cloud-related businesses and will be challenged to manage
the broad range of demands on its management team and its engineering resources. It must
devote significant resources to OpenStack development, while also investing in its own
proprietary, differentiated capabilities.
Return to Top
Savvis
Savvis, a CenturyLink company, is a Web hoster with a long track record of leadership in the
hosting market. It has a suite of both public and private VMware-virtualized IaaS offerings with
optional managed services, under the Symphony brand, offered in data centers in the U.S.,
Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Singapore and the U.K. It also offers database as a
service and co-location.
Strengths
Savvis has a very broad, multitiered IaaS product portfolio that can address a diverse range
of customer needs, and a well-established track record of delivering enterprise cloud
services for production and mission-critical needs. It has a particular emphasis on broad,
deep security features. It offers its own custom portal, although Symphony Virtual Private
Data Center (VPDC, its public cloud offering) also has a vCloud Director portal option.
Most Web hosters do not offer their managed hosting customer portal to self-service, cloud-
only customers. Savvis is one of the few that does. Its customer portal has one of the most
comprehensive feature sets in the hosting industry and is, consequently, exceptional for the
cloud IaaS market.
While Savvis is increasingly focused on using the cloud as a means to enter the data center
outsourcing market, it nevertheless has a competitive feature set for self-service, and
successfully blends the self-service and managed services models across a hybrid solution
portfolio. The existing Savvis base of managed hosting and co-location customers, along with
the CenturyLink customer base, provides Savvis with cross-selling opportunities.
Recommended uses: General business applications, enterprise applications, and test and
development.
Cautions
Savvis has an extremely diverse product portfolio, with multiple flavors of single-tenant and
multi-tenant IaaS. This can be confusing to prospective customers, and it can be difficult to
decide which solution or combination of solutions is right for one's needs. It also proliferates
narrow point solutions, rather than creating a unified platform that can be used to deliver a
variety of flexible solutions.
CenturyLink acquired Qwest and Savvis in 2011. While it is focused on integrating Qwest,
Savvis has been left as a largely unchanged stand-alone entity, except for the integration of
Qwest's hosting assets. But once CenturyLink finishes "digesting" Qwest, it may reassess its
strategy for its Savvis assets.
Return to Top
SoftLayer
Page 11
28/08/2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1CKSZ0E&ct=121022&st=sg 11/17
SoftLayer is an independent Web hoster with a focus on SMBs. CloudLayer, its paid-by-the-VM,
Citrix-Xen-virtualized, public and private cloud IaaS, is offered in data centers in the U.S., the
Netherlands and Singapore. It also offers OpenStack object-based storage with an integrated
CDN (via a partnership with Internap).
Strengths
SoftLayer is a thought leader in automated, highly standardized infrastructure services,
provisioned on demand. It has an excellent portal, which offers integrated management
across all its offerings.
CloudLayer has a particularly clean service composition, with a range of options that can be
added on a per-instance, paid-by-the-hour basis, including aspects such as the type of
monitoring and the automated response to a failure detected by that monitor. Instances can
be either VMs or dedicated servers, and it emphasizes that "bare metal" physical servers can
be managed with the same elasticity as VMs.
CloudLayer has an array of paid-by-the-hour, per-instance security options, including the
option to integrate with third-party authentication (such as VeriSign Identity Protection).
SoftLayer also offers free vulnerability scanning and payment card industry (PCI) compliance
scans (in partnership with McAfee).
Recommended uses: E-business hosting, general business applications, self-managed hybrid
hosting, batch computing, and large-scale use cases such as gaming where "bare metal" is
desirable.
Cautions
SoftLayer is strongly focused on self-service for SMB customers, although it has begun to
target large-scale enterprise deals that need more consultative sales, a deeper level of
support and greater flexibility from a service provider. Its feature set and road map,
however, are focused on the needs of SMBs.
Although SoftLayer has historically targeted technology businesses, it has previously
principally targeted IT administrators rather than developers. It now has active developer
outreach efforts, but its proprietary API has not gained widespread third-party tools support.
Return to Top
Terremark
Terremark, a Verizon company, encompasses Verizon's data center, cloud and security
businesses. Its Enterprise Cloud brand encompasses multiple VMware-virtualized offerings — the
standard Enterprise Cloud (public cloud from the original Terremark), Private Edition (public cloud
with single-tenant compute), Managed Edition (formerly the Verizon Computing as a Service public
cloud offering), Express Edition (vCloud Express-based paid-by-the-VM public cloud), Public Sector
(U.S. federal government community cloud) — delivered from data centers in the U.S., Brazil, Hong
Kong, the Netherlands and the U.K. Managed services are optional. Terremark also offers co-
location.
Strengths
Terremark, via the standard Enterprise Cloud service, is the market share leader in VMware-
virtualized cloud IaaS. It has the longest track record in the market for enterprise-class
public cloud IaaS, and among the best feature sets.
Terremark can address hybrid hosting use cases via the Enterprise Cloud Managed Edition,
which can offer "bare metal" physical servers on daily metering. This service also bundles in
managed services, but it has fewer self-service capabilities.
Terremark is developing a next-generation, unified platform that will launch in 2013. This
new platform will enable Terremark to address a much broader range of use cases, and
consolidates its development efforts onto a single hypervisor-neutral platform.
Terremark's CloudSwitch acquisition gives it a tool that can be used to facilitate migration
from, and interoperability with, other cloud environments, including AWS. It is using
management talent acquired from CloudSwitch to drive its future strategy.
Recommended uses: General business applications, and test and development.
Cautions
Until Terremark launches its new unified platform, customers must be careful to match the
service they choose to their particular use case. Customers should also be aware that while
Terremark is continuing to enhance existing offerings, its engineering focus has shifted to
the new platform.
Although Terremark has always done a significant amount of software development, rather
than being wholly reliant on VMware, it is staking its future success on rapid innovation
driven by agile development. This is an unusual strategy for a company that is owned by a
carrier, and it is highly dependent on Verizon's willingness to interfere minimally with
management.
Return to Top
Tier 3
Tier 3 is a small, independent service provider that is solely focused on cloud services. It offers
paid-by-the-VM, vCloud Powered public cloud IaaS from data centers in the U.S., Canada,
Germany and the U.K. It also offers database as a service, and is venturing into Cloud Foundry-
based PaaS. It is responsible for Iron Foundry, the .NET extension of Cloud Foundry.
Strengths
Tier 3 combines a good set of features on a well-engineered platform, with an easy-to-use
self-service portal. Although it is a vCloud Powered offering, its core architecture and
software platform contain substantial custom engineering of its own, and it has an
innovative and ambitious road map. It can offer a "premium" tier of VMs that are
automatically replicated into a second data center, a unique feature. It has an exceptionally
Page 12
28/08/2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1CKSZ0E&ct=121022&st=sg 12/17
strong SLA.
Tier 3 has a scriptable templating feature called Blueprints. Blueprints can be used to
provision complex, multi-data-center infrastructure configurations incorporating VMs, network
elements and applications. For instance, one of Tier 3's provided Blueprints can provision
highly available Microsoft Exchange Server using data availability groups.
Tier 3 is becoming a hypervisor-agnostic provider, with the intent to provide a unified
interface to clouds that are built using multiple different CMPs. It is emphasizing white-label
and reseller capabilities, and the ability to federate between different Tier 3-based clouds.
Recommended uses: E-business hosting, cloud-native applications, general business
applications, and test and development.
Cautions
While Tier 3's offering is vCloud Powered, it does not expose the vCD UI. Consequently,
customers do not receive the full extent of vCD's self-service capabilities. However, Tier 3
offers many additional features that are not part of vCD, and it is trying to strategically
reduce its dependence on VMware.
Tier 3 has limited brand awareness, marketing budget and sales capacity. It will be
challenged to grow its business in an increasingly noisy, crowded market, and its global
expansion will be highly dependent on partners.
Tier 3 is a small but innovative service provider with a pure cloud IaaS business, which
makes it a highly attractive target for acquisition.
Return to Top
Virtustream
Virtustream is a small, independent service provider that is solely focused on cloud services. It
offers hypervisor-neutral public and private IaaS on its xStream platform, available from data
centers in the U.S. and the U.K. Managed services are optional.
Strengths
Virtustream's founders have backgrounds in VMware and SAP consultancies, and the
company has a strongly consultative approach, as well as particular expertise in SAP. Its
cloud is targeted primarily at production applications, but in an unusual approach, it is
targeting both traditional enterprise workloads, including ERP applications, as well as cloud-
native applications.
Virtustream has developed its own cloud platform technology, and uses a single unified
architecture across public and private offerings, both within its own data centers and within
customer data centers. While much of its infrastructure is VMware-virtualized, it can also
support other hypervisors, and it is compatible with the AWS API.
Virtustream's micro-VM technology allows it to charge for resources consumed, rather than
resources allocated, and to offer policy-based service-level management and application
performance SLAs. It has focused on meeting enterprise security and compliance needs, and
it will be one of the first IaaS providers to support Intel's Trusted Execution Technology
(TXT).
Recommended uses: Enterprise applications, general business applications, e-business
hosting and cloud-native applications.
Cautions
Although Virtustream supports a solid set of self-service features, it primarily targets
complex, mission-critical applications where it is likely that the customer will purchase
professional services assistance for implementation, and managed services on an ongoing
basis.
Virtustream is a small but innovative service provider, and may be an attractive target for
acquisition. Its strategy will require it to attract and retain significant engineering talent as
well as application expertise. It will be challenged to grow its brand awareness and to
manage the lengthy sales cycles that will be common in its target use cases.
Return to Top
Vendors Added or Dropped
We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as markets
change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant or
MarketScope may change over time. A vendor appearing in a Magic Quadrant or MarketScope one
year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that
vendor. This may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation
criteria, or a change of focus by a vendor.
Return to Top
Added
Dell
Dimension Data (replacing OpSource, which it acquired)
Fujitsu
OVH
Virtustream
Return to Top
Dropped
We dropped several vendors from this Magic Quadrant because we changed the inclusion criteria
Page 13
28/08/2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1CKSZ0E&ct=121022&st=sg 13/17
to limit the evaluation to the top 15 vendors by market share, rather than using a minimum
amount of revenue; this reduced the number of included vendors from 20 to 15. All of the vendors
that were dropped qualify for this Magic Quadrant on all criteria except for market share, and
should still be considered in competitive evaluations. The dropped vendors are:
AT&T
Carpathia Hosting
Datapipe
Hosting.com
IBM
iland
NaviSite
Tata Communications
Virtacore Systems
Return to Top
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
To appear in this Magic Quadrant, vendors had to meet, as of June 2012, the following criteria:
They must sell public cloud compute IaaS as a stand-alone service, without the requirement
to bundle it with managed hosting, application development, application maintenance or
other outsourcing. They may, optionally, also sell a private version of this offering that uses
the same architecture but is not multi-tenant.
The service must be enterprise-class, offering 24/7 customer support (including phone
support), SLAs, the ability to scale an application beyond the capacity of a single physical
server, an allowable VM size of at least eight compute units and 15 GB of RAM, the ability to
support secure connectivity to the infrastructure, and support for role-based access control.
They must offer this service in a minimum of two data centers, located in different
metropolitan areas.
They must be among the top 15 global providers, by Gartner-estimated market share for the
evaluated services (public cloud IaaS and standardized private cloud IaaS).
Vendors Considered, but Not Included
This Magic Quadrant is global, but many of the providers are based in the U.S. This is a reflection
of the way the market is evolving. The market has matured more quickly in the U.S. and the bulk
of revenue comes from U.S.-based customers and flows to U.S.-based companies — U.S.-based
IaaS providers typically derive 20% or more of their revenue from customers outside the U.S.
However, most of the providers in this Magic Quadrant offer their services on a global basis; most
have at least one data center in North America, Western Europe and Asia/Pacific.
In the evaluations for this Magic Quadrant, we considered a variety of interesting cloud IaaS
providers but we were unable to include them because they did not have sufficient market share.
The more distinctive providers include:
CloudSigma, which has a unique pricing model with five-minute billing increments and
programmatically accessible, demand-based, dynamic pricing.
FireHost, which specializes in compliant solutions, especially for PCI.
NaviSite, a Time Warner Cable Company, which has a broad and innovative feature set, and
is one of the most capable platforms for enterprise applications.
Peer 1 Hosting, whose Zunicore cloud IaaS offering has HPC options, including nVidia GPUs in
"bare metal" physical servers.
There were also providers that did not have public cloud IaaS offerings in general availability by
June 2012, but had launched betas. Such providers include Microsoft (which introduced a
persistent VM capability into Windows Azure, thereby giving it full IaaS functionality along with
PaaS), Google (which introduced Google Compute Engine, an IaaS offering) and HP (which
introduced HP Cloud Compute).
We excluded PaaS providers from this Magic Quadrant, even though some businesses may use
PaaS in a very IaaS-like manner. However, these PaaS offerings do not allow customers to obtain
raw VMs that can be loaded with arbitrary OSs, middleware and applications, which is a
requirement for being considered as IaaS. For PaaS providers, see "Platform as a Service:
Definition, Taxonomy and Vendor Landscape, 2012."
Return to Top
Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
Gartner analysts evaluate technology providers on the quality and efficacy of the processes,
systems, methods or procedures that enable IT providers' performance to be competitive, efficient
and effective, and to positively affect revenue, retention and reputation. Ultimately, technology
providers are judged on their ability to capitalize on their vision, and on their success in doing so.
We evaluated vendors' Ability to Execute in this market by using the following criteria:
Product/Service: Service providers were evaluated on the capabilities of their cloud IaaS
offering to support the four use cases being evaluated. We evaluated the breadth and
depth of the feature set, self-service capabilities, automated system management and
suitability to run a broad range of workload types.
Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization): Providers were evaluated on:
Page 14
28/08/2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1CKSZ0E&ct=121022&st=sg 14/17
the success of their cloud IaaS business, as demonstrated by current revenue and revenue
growth since the launch of their service; their financial wherewithal to continue investing in
the business, and to execute successfully on their road maps; and their organizational
commitment to this business, and its importance to the company's overall strategy.
Sales Execution/Pricing: Providers were evaluated on their ability to: address the range of
buyers for IaaS, including developers and business managers, as well as IT operations
organizations; adapt to "frictionless selling" with online sales, immediate trials and proofs of
concept; provide consultative sales and solutions engineering; be highly responsive to
prospective customers; and offer value for money.
Market Responsiveness and Track Record: The market is evolving extremely quickly and the
rate of technological innovation is very high. Providers were evaluated on how well they
have historically been able to respond to changing buyer needs and technology
developments, rapidly iterate their service offerings, and deliver promised enhancements
and services by the expected time.
Marketing Execution: Providers were evaluated on: their mind share and brand awareness in
the market; their ability to convey marketing messages based on their ability to deliver real
business value, not empty hype or misleading "cloudwashing;" and the clarity and accuracy
of their marketing messages, compared with their actual service offering.
Customer Experience: Providers were evaluated on: the quality and responsiveness of their
account management and technical support; the ease of use of their self-service
functionality; the capabilities of their customer portal (additional functionality such as
monitoring, reporting and trouble ticketing); the usefulness of their documentation and
customer communications; the quality of their SLAs; ease of doing business with them; and
overall customer satisfaction.
Operations: Providers were evaluated on: their ability to meet their goals and commitments,
including their track record of service delivery; the quality of their response to outages; and
their ability to meet timelines that are communicated to customers and to the market.
Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria Weighting
Product/Service high
Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization) standard
Sales Execution/Pricing standard
Market Responsiveness and Track Record high
Marketing Execution standard
Customer Experience standard
Operations standard
Source: Gartner (October 2012)
Completeness of Vision
Gartner analysts evaluate technology providers on their ability to articulate logical statements
convincingly about current and future market direction, innovation, customer needs and
competitive forces, as well as how they map to Gartner's position. Ultimately, technology
providers are assessed on their understanding of the ways in which market forces can be
exploited to create opportunities.
We assessed vendors' Completeness of Vision in this market by using the following criteria:
Market Understanding: Providers were evaluated on their understanding of the wants and
needs of three different buying constituencies in this market — enterprises, midmarket
businesses and technology companies of all sizes — both currently and in the longer term as
the use of IaaS matures.
Marketing Strategy: Providers were evaluated on their ability to articulate their position in the
market and their competitive differentiation, and to communicate these messages clearly and
consistently, both internally and externally.
Sales Strategy: Providers were evaluated on their understanding of the buying centers for
the market, and the way that these different buying centers want to engage with sales, as
well as their strategy for adapting their sales force, online channel and partner channels to
the IaaS market.
Offering (Product) Strategy: Providers were evaluated on the breadth, depth, quality and
differentiation of their service road maps, as relevant to the four use cases under evaluation,
with an emphasis on self-service, automated IT operations management and overall feature
set.
Business Model: Providers were evaluated on their overall value proposition and their
strategy for providing solutions for the use cases under consideration, not just raw
infrastructure elements. This included evaluating how IaaS fits into their broader product
portfolio and product strategy.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: Providers were evaluated on their ability to offer targeted services
for particular verticals, such as government, biotech, media and entertainment, and retail.
This includes sales and marketing to such verticals, their ability to meet specialized
compliance needs, and vertical-specific solutions.
Innovation: Providers were evaluated on the level of investment in the future of their
business, and the quality of those investments, whether financial or human capital; this
includes aspects such as the deployment of engineering resources, investments in new
technology, mergers and acquisitions, and partnerships and alliances.
Geographic Strategy: Providers were evaluated on their ability to expand their offering
beyond their home region, serving the needs of multinational businesses, as well as
adapting their offerings to other geographies. In particular, this included their strategy for
Page 15
28/08/2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1CKSZ0E&ct=121022&st=sg 15/17
international sales and support, as well as their data center footprint and
internationalization efforts.
Table 2. Completeness of Vision
Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria Weighting
Market Understanding high
Marketing Strategy standard
Sales Strategy standard
Offering (Product) Strategy high
Business Model standard
Vertical/Industry Strategy low
Innovation high
Geographic Strategy low
Source: Gartner (October 2012)
Quadrant Descriptions
Leaders
Leaders have distinguished themselves by offering an excellent service and having an ambitious
future road map. They usually serve a broad range of use cases well, although they do not excel
in all areas, and they are not necessarily the best providers for a specific need. They have a track
record of successful delivery, along with many referenceable customers.
Return to Top
Challengers
Challengers are well-positioned to serve current market needs. They deliver a good service that is
targeted at a particular set of use cases, and they have a track record of successful delivery and
many referenceable customers. They typically have a road map that is well focused on the
customer segments that they serve, but it is not broadly ambitious, although they are making
significant investments in the business.
Return to Top
Visionaries
Visionaries have an ambitious vision of the future, and are making significant investments in the
development of unique technologies, but the service that they deliver today is best for a narrow
range of use cases.
Return to Top
Niche Players
Niche Players may be excellent providers for the use cases in which they specialize, but may not
serve a broad range of use cases well, or have a broadly ambitious road map. They may be
relatively new entrants to this market.
Return to Top
Context
When people think about "cloud computing," cloud IaaS is often one of the first things that comes
to mind. It's the "computing" in cloud computing — on-demand compute, storage and network
resources, delivered on-demand, in near-real-time, as a service. There has been tremendous
hype surrounding these services, but there are a number of use cases for which cloud IaaS
delivers excellent business value. Although the market is immature, it is evolving rapidly; it is
beginning the journey up the Slope of Enlightenment on Gartner's "Hype Cycle for Cloud
Computing, 2012." Unfortunately, there is a great deal of market confusion and many providers
articulate their offerings poorly. Therefore, care should be taken in sourcing these services.
The common use cases for cloud IaaS are: development and testing environments; high-
performance computing and batch processing; Internet-facing websites and Web-based
applications (which may or may not have architectures specifically designed for the cloud); and
non-mission-critical internal business applications. Initially, most businesses choose use cases
that are peripheral to their organization's IT needs, but over time, adopt cloud IaaS for
mainstream business applications as well, including mission-critical applications, mirroring the past
decade's adoption pattern of virtualization in the data center. Many businesses, especially in the
midmarket, will eventually migrate away from running their own data centers in favor of relying
primarily on infrastructure in the cloud.
Although, at present, sourcing cloud IaaS is typically a tactical decision, many organizations are
also looking for long-term strategic partners. However, we believe that the market is too
immature for strategic choices to be made at this stage, and we recommend that prospective
customers focus on finding the cloud provider that matches their specific use case, and likely their
anticipated use cases for the next year. In many cases, businesses may have to use multiple
cloud IaaS providers to meet the needs of a set of diverse use cases.
Return to Top
Page 16
28/08/2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1CKSZ0E&ct=121022&st=sg 16/17
Market Overview
Cloud IaaS is computing resources, along with associated storage and network resources, offered
to the customer via self-service in a highly-automated way, on-demand and in near-real-time. In
IaaS, the provider manages the data center facilities, hardware and virtualization, but everything
above the hypervisor layer — the OS, middleware and application — is managed by the customer,
or is an add-on managed service from the provider or another third party. This market is wholly
separate and distinct from cloud PaaS and SaaS.
Cloud IaaS is owned, built, and operated by a service provider, but it may be delivered on-
premises within a customer's data center or hosted in the provider's data center. It may be
"public" (multi-tenant) or "private" (single-tenant), although, in practice, there is no consistency in
the application of these labels, and most hosted offerings use some degree of shared resources
in services labeled "private."
Cloud IaaS is not a commoditized service, and even providers with very similar offerings and
underlying technologies often have sufficiently different implementations that there is a material
difference in availability, performance, security and service features. See "Evaluating Cloud
Infrastructure as a Service" and its related reports to understand the range of options available
in this market.
What Type of Workloads Are Being Placed on Cloud IaaS?
There are three broad categories of customer needs in cloud IaaS:
The hosting of a single application, or a closely related group of applications
A VDC that will serve a broad range of different workloads
Batch computing
Hosting is the most common need. For instance, a media company with a marketing microsite for a
movie, a software company offering SaaS and a retailer needing a lightweight version of its e-
commerce site for disaster-recovery purposes are all examples of customers with hosting needs
that can be fulfilled by IaaS. These are generally production applications, although there is some
test and development as well. Some of these customers have mission-critical needs, while others
do not.
Customers with a broad range of unrelated workloads are less commonplace, but are growing in
importance, particularly in the midmarket, where IaaS is gradually replacing or supplementing
traditional data center infrastructure. The VDC is typically used very similarly to the organization's
internal virtualization environment — primarily for less mission-critical production applications, or
test and development environments — but is increasingly being used to run more mission-critical
applications.
The least common need, but one that nevertheless drives significant revenue for the small
number of providers that service this portion of the market, is batch computing. For these
customers, IaaS serves as a substitute for traditional high-performance computing or grid
computing. Customer needs include rendering, video encoding, genetic sequencing, modeling and
simulation, numerical analysis and data analytics. Other than the need to access large amounts of
commodity compute at the lowest possible price, with little concern for infrastructure reliability,
these customers typically have needs very similar to those of VDC customers, although some HPC
use cases benefit from specialized hardware such as GPUs and high-speed interconnects.
What Are the Key Market Aspects of Which Buyers Should Be Aware?
One size does not fit all. As the IaaS market matures, clarity is emerging about the range of
different customer needs. Workloads vary in their availability and performance needs, and in the
general complexity of the overall application infrastructure. Customers vary in the importance that
they place on security, customer service and ease of use. Customers also vary in how much they
want to manage themselves, versus how much they want the IaaS provider to manage for them.
While some providers are beginning to address differentiated customer needs in a targeted
fashion, most service providers still take a "one size fits all" approach, which can make it difficult
to determine if a particular provider is the right one for a particular set of business and technical
needs.
IaaS can be used to run a broadening range of workloads. Service providers are moving toward
infrastructure platforms that can offer physical (non-virtualized) and virtual resources, priced
according to the level of availability, performance, security and isolation that the customer selects.
This allows customers to run both "cloud native" applications that have been architected with
cloud transaction processing principles in mind (see "From OLTP to Cloud TP: The Third Era of
Transaction Processing Aims to the Cloud"), as well as migrate existing business applications from
their own virtualized servers in internal data centers into the cloud, without changes.
Public and private cloud IaaS are converging. Service providers are increasingly using dynamic
physical and logical isolation mechanisms to create "private" infrastructure within a shared, multi-
tenant capacity pool. This allows economies of scale while enabling customers to meet a broader
range of security and compliance requirements. See "Best Practice: Evaluate Isolation
Mechanisms in Public and Private Cloud IaaS" for details on this convergence and how to choose
the level of isolation that you need. We believe that over time, the leading providers will offer a
single, highly flexible platform across both their own data centers and customer data centers. As
a result, this 2012 Magic Quadrant covers not only public cloud IaaS, but standardized private
cloud IaaS as well.
The buying centers for IaaS are diverse. The early adopters in the IaaS market were developers. As
the market matures, developers remain an important audience, because a great deal of IaaS
adoption is business led — driven by business managers who hold the budget, need greater
agility and have shorter time frames than IT Operations is able to accommodate, and who
therefore turn to application developers and enterprise architects for a solution. This is
particularly true for the single-application, "hosting" side of the market. IT Operations is, however,
increasingly involved in IaaS sourcing, and is likely to be the primary buying center for multiple-
Page 17
28/08/2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1CKSZ0E&ct=121022&st=sg 17/17
application needs. IaaS providers vary in their ability to target these different buying centers.
Furthermore, most providers focus on either a developer audience or an IT operations audience,
and their feature set and style of service are oriented accordingly.
More aspects of IT operations management are being automated, so that IaaS offers value beyond
self-service provisioning. For companies with reasonable access to capital and which already have
an IT operations team, today's IaaS offerings may not represent cost savings for typical business
workloads. Self-service provisioning in the public cloud is often not a significant improvement over
a well-managed virtualized infrastructure within an internal data center. To truly drive value to
customers, cloud IaaS providers must expose superior IT operations management tools to
customers, and find ways to reduce the burden of operations, starting with automated patch
management and backups. Manual managed services are frequently used to substitute for
automated offerings. Evolving toward the delivery of automated IT operations management, in
conjunction with self-service tools and reports, is critical for leadership in this market. Similarly,
providers are increasingly offering programmatic (API) access to their infrastructure, which
enables customers, as well as third parties, to build management tools for their platforms.
Customers do not usually save money by using cloud IaaS. While many customers first investigate
using IaaS to achieve cost savings, most customers buy IaaS to achieve greater business agility,
or to gain access to infrastructure capabilities that they do not have within their own data center.
IaaS can drive significant cost savings when customers have short-term, seasonal, disaster
recovery or batch computing needs. It can also be a boon to companies with limited access to
capital and to small companies, especially startups, which cannot afford to invest in infrastructure.
(See "Cloud Computing Can Be the Singular Solution for at Least Five Use Cases" for details.) For
larger businesses with existing internal data centers and IT operations teams, IaaS for steady-
state workloads is often no less expensive, and may be more expensive, than an internal private
cloud. While provider efficiencies will increase over time, and automated managed services will
substantially drive down the cost of infrastructure management, the state of technology has not
yet advanced to that point.
There are many providers, but they vary widely in quality. There are many competitors in the
market; new entrants continue to launch offerings and existing providers are expanding the
market segments that they serve. Many providers are more interested in managed services than
in the highly automated, self-service market, and consequently the quality of their technology and
their investment in engineering varies greatly. Moreover, many of the newer market entrants are
very large IT companies with a great deal of sales reach, which has enabled them to rapidly take
market share. Yet these companies do not necessarily have superior offerings. Indeed, many of
the better providers are actually smaller, highly innovative companies. Nevertheless, this is
becoming a scale business, and many providers will be challenged to execute well in the rapidly
evolving market. Most providers are able to deliver a basic offering — with reasonable availability,
performance and security, and good customer support — but many have limited differentiation
and value-add beyond the ability to provision resources quickly. Therefore, significant due
diligence must be taken to evaluate providers thoroughly.
Return to Top
© 2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates. This publication may not be
reproduced or distributed in any form without Gartner’s prior written permission. If you are authorized to access this publication, your use of it is subject to the
Usage Guidelines for Gartner Services posted on gartner.com. The information contained in this publication has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable.
Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information and shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies
in such information. This publication consists of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. The opinions
expressed herein are subject to change without notice. Although Gartner research may include a discussion of related legal issues, Gartner does not provide legal
advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner is a public company, and its shareholders may include firms and funds that
have financial interests in entities covered in Gartner research. Gartner’s Board of Directors may include senior managers of these firms or funds. Gartner research
is produced independently by its research organization without input or influence from these firms, funds or their managers. For further information on the
independence and integrity of Gartner research, see “Guiding Principles on Independence and Objectivity.”
About Gartner | Careers | Newsroom | Policies | Site Index | IT Glossary | Contact Gartner