First published on CloudBlogs on Oct, 07 2014
Every year, during the Spring and Summer, there is a flurry of analysis released from Gartner and some of the most anticipated insights come via what Gartner calls the
Magic Quadrant
(MQ).
The MQ “provides a graphical competitive positioning of four types of technology providers, in markets where growth is high and provider differentiation is distinct.” One of those types are “Leaders” or by Gartner’s definition, vendors who “execute well against their current vision and are well positioned for tomorrow.” *
Over the past couple months, there have been four Gartner Magic Quadrants released which address facets of Cloud infrastructure:
As you formulate your organization’s cloud strategy, I encourage you to carefully consider the importance of being able to flexibly move your apps and workloads between clouds. No customer has ever told me they want to be locked into a single solution; for a huge variety of reasons we all want to have the option to move apps and workloads across clouds as/when needed.
When you consider the strategy I have been writing about on this blog over the last 18+ months, I believe the fact that Microsoft is currently positioned as a leader in all four segments shouldn’t be a surprise.
Our strategy has been about consistency across clouds which gives IT the ability to seamlessly migrate workloads/apps across private, hosted, and public clouds. This vision has been core to every aspect of our strategy.
Another huge Microsoft-only strength to evaluate, in my opinion, is that migrating workloads/apps are especially fast across our clouds because
all of our clouds are compatible
.
We are also
constantly innovating
. With things like the
Windows Azure Pack
we are able to constantly bring Azure capabilities to Windows Server and System Center deployments. Our cloud consistency means you can dev anywhere and then deploy in any of these clouds. Our competitors simply cannot deliver this.
We believe the principle that has put us in this position is simple:
Cloud-first
. This is an engineering principle that has us first prove and harden our solutions in the public cloud, then we bring them on-premises. This is important to our end-users in the IT community because every piece of software we provide for your datacenters has already been tested and validated at internet-wide scale. Anything you get from us is
100% ready to deploy in your business
.
This Cloud-first principle also enables us to get value out to you much,
much
faster via an accelerated (cloud speed) cadence for our on-prem releases. Now you get regular releases that bring consistent, incremental value with more stability than ever before.
I believe these four Gartner Magic Quadrants are a validation of our strategy/vision, as well as our ongoing execution. We are looking forward to working more closely with you and delivering you the cloud(s) your organization needs to succeed!
1
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Lydia Leong, May 28, 2014
2
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure, Thomas J. Bittman, July 2, 2014
3
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platform as a Service, Yefim V. Natis, January 7, 2014
4
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Storage Services, Gene Ruth, July 9, 2014
*Per Gartner’s definition:
http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/research_mq.jsp
**Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.**
