Gartner Names AWS, Microsoft As Leaders In IaaS Market

Industry analyst Gartner has named Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure (MSFT) as the top infrastructure-as-a-service platforms of 2015, with both companies ranking highly in the leadership quadrant of the company’s Magic Quadrant system. Both Amazon (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT) were the only two IaaS providers to achieve leadership status this year, beating out 13 other service providers worldwide.

According to Gartner, the IaaS market is in a state of upheaval due in part to a lack of market traction among service providers. This, in turn, has led to a state of uncertainty for IaaS customers as many providers continue to shift their overall shift in strategy to recover their footing in the market.

Both Amazon and Microsoft beat out other legacy IaaS providers like Google (GOOG) and VMware (VMW) for the top positions, with both companies excelling in utilizing their respective brands to develop their solutions and in keeping prices competitive, according to the report.

As the market leader, Amazon has the most diverse customer base and the broadest range of use cases in the industry, with a large partner ecosystem to back their solutions, according to Gartner. However, customers should be cautious of the company’s expanding reach into traditional IT vendors’ territory, which could cause additional competition down the line. However, Gartner believes that Amazon holds a “multi-year” lead over the rest of the competition in the IaaS space.

Like Amazon, Microsoft has a diverse set of integrated IaaS and Paas Solutions that work together as a unified whole, with a slew of new resources and services in play to expand its solutions, according to Gartner. But while Microsoft has leveraged its brand to effectively and rapidly increase its presence in the IaaS market, Gartner said customers need to consider the company’s relatively small partner ecosystem and Azure’s dependence on previously existing Microsoft relationships when looking to implement the company’s platform.

News of Amazon’s continued success in the infrastructure service market was echoed in a recent Synergy Research Group study, which found that Amazon remains larger than any of the top competing players in the market combined, due to strong market growth and steady investment in its network.

Last month, the company revealed its Amazon Web Services quarterly revenue for the first time with the company reporting a whopping 49 percent increase in net sales for Q1 2015 over the same quarter a year ago.