Nice
"paranormal parallelogram", "soothsaying square", "cloudy cognitive services"
It's greatly good to see Simon doggedly developing his alliterative aspirations.
Gartner has published a new magic quadrant for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) that – surprising nobody – has Amazon Web Services and Microsoft alone in the leader's quadrant and a few others thought outside of the box. Here's the Soothsaying Square in all its glory. Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a …
MS being ahead of Google in every cloudy way, the visionaries, the co-leaders?
I'm not surprised by this particular report either.
I don't understand why the staid, unimaginative 1980s behemouth that is MS is able to be ahead of Google. What is it about MS's corporate culture that means they can do this, and what is it about Google's so that they're not keeping up with either MS or Amazon, despite having all that cash in the bank. Could it be that "servers" and "infrastructure" just aren't as exciting as a self driving car, or the next version of Android?
"What is it about MS's corporate culture that means they can do this, and what is it about Google's so that they're not keeping up"
I haven't read the report, but from my perspective Google's tech is good but harder to integrate with unless you are a hard-core Java developer.
The big issue with GCS though is that they are a right pain to deal with. That's Google corporate culture - Google awesome, customer stupid - and it doesn't wash with large corporates who want to negotiate. Negotiating with Google is like negotiating with a brick wall and anyone with a competent IT or legal team will walk away.
That's why Google have to sell, for example, BigQuery to their existing board-level contacts in Advertising or Marketing and not through a grass-roots up approach from the Devs like AWS do.
Microsoft are doing both, pushing Azure at existing MS Devs and also advertising heavily to the masses.
"Google's tech is good but harder to integrate with unless you are a hard-core Java developer."
Partially correct. For the devs the PaaS services on offer on Google's cloud are a lot less easy to integrate than on AWS or Azure. There's very much an air of "we invented all of this stuff so do everything our way or not at all". Notably they're missing key enterprise services, being very weak on governance and monitoring.
The reasons Azure has gained huge market share are mostly nontechnical. Microsoft have an enormous and experienced enterprise sales force. Google do not. Microsoft already have 6, 7 or 8 figure deals with every business on the planet. Google do not. The overwhelming majority of enterprises have Microsoft at the heart of their estates. Even Linux-heavy shops probably have Office, Exchange and AD lying around.
This gives Microsoft a huge, huge advantage for getting in the door, able to tailor discount-heavy sticky deals centred around O365. Once they've achieved that they've promoted growth by by delivering actually good services. Running commodity software on Azure is a pleasant experience. Things, mostly, just work as expected. Documentation is good enough. Costs (once they're discounted) are acceptable. There are no glaring gaps in its capabilities.
In our customer base here in EMEA the second wave enterprises who are only just adopting cloud architectures seriously are picking Azure at least as often as they're picking AWS. No tech-heavy mega deals, but enough meaty stuff that they're probably printing money by now.
As the story notes, this study is on "Infrastructure as a Service" (IaaS), not "Platform as a Service". Google placed their bets on PaaS very early, and got into IaaS much later. The absence of other major cloud vendors from the study is due to them not being in the IaaS side of the market at all.
Microsoft's cloud is more focused on IaaS because they have a lot of customers who want to move legacy applications to "the cloud" so they can shut down data centres and bin staff as a cost saving (theoretically, anyway). Microsoft's efforts at PaaS on the other hand have supposedly not gone as well.
Google doesn't have that legacy system base, as they started off as a cloudy type company right from the beginning. Thus, they're focused on applications that were designed from the ground up for "the cloud", and their PaaS is oriented around this.
So it goes like this:
Amazon - By far the biggest, cheap, lots of third parties based on it.
Microsoft - Move your legacy applications to "the cloud".
Google - Mainly PaaS.
Salesforce, etc. - Entirely PaaS.
OpenStack vendors - Like Amazon, but with less vendor lock-in.
Theoretically, PaaS applications should take less effort to create, be more scalable, and require fewer resources to run and so should be cheaper to operate in the long run. On the other hand, if the PaaS is proprietary, then there's more vendor lock-in. Decisions, decisions.
Let me fix: The cloud leader is AWS and M$ also has a cloud offering.
It's a pretty well known fact that any assessment of Microsoft by Gartner needs to be discounted by at least 70%. Why they keep sucking that particular lollypop is not clear, but ho-hum, they do.
Anyone considering Azure as anything mature, even less so stable, must have very pointy hair with a very strong case of "nobody got fired by buying services from our synergic cloud leaders in enterprise space and price gouging".
While Microsoft Azure is an enterprise-ready platform, Gartner clients report that the service experience feels less enterprise-ready than they expected, given Microsoft's long history as an enterprise vendor.
Gartner... it says it all really. I wonder who paid for this latest Gartner advert, ahem, research article?
Seriously though - given the disjointed inconsistent mess that Microsoft apply to all back end systems, configuration tools, applications and, well, everything, it's fully expected that Microsoft's Azure/O365 configuration system is a minefield mess.
Magic - having or apparently having supernatural powers.
Magic is and has always been a synonym for bullshit - sorry, kids, there is no such thing as the "supernatural".
Gartner's wishful thinking in full swing.
We were once "Niche", after a year of inviting the guys out for dinner and stuff we became "challengers" ...
dunno where we are now, probably with the "leaders" ... no I do not care ... our marketing department does ...