Public cloud leaders blasted for 'unreliability', 'immaturity' and 'feature-poor' products in analyst report

Gartner takes aim at AWS, Microsoft, Google and more in latest Magic Quadrant report

The biggest public cloud players have received a roasting from Gartner in its latest magic quadrant, with the leading names criticised for reliability issues and poor services.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud remain in the Leaders segment, while Oracle, Alibaba and IBM retain their positions in the Niche Players quadrant.

Despite being positioned as leaders, AWS, Microsoft and Google still came under fire.

The report assessed each vendor's individual strengths and weaknesses, the latter of which attracted some strong words from Gartner.

AWS continues to be the market leader, with Gartner praising it as a mature, "enterprise-ready" provider.

However, it drew criticism from the analyst for prioritising being the first to market over the strength of its offering.

"It is willing to launch feature-poor services or services without deep cross-platform integration, which it often defers to the future to address," the report stated.

"The quest to be first to market sometimes results in services that need years of substantial engineering updates."

Amazon's encroachment into new areas might also spell danger for its cloud arm, as Gartner claims companies in these verticals have instructed their IT teams to avoid using AWS where possible.

"This may ultimately limit AWS' success in some verticals, and may impact the associated ecosystem," warned Gartner.

Microsoft Azure continues to play second fiddle to AWS's market dominance, but the analyst report praised the tech vendor for its ability to sell Azure with its other offerings, driving its adoption rate.

The report, however, called out Azure's "reliability issues", stating that they continue to present challenges to customers.

"Since September 2018, Azure has had multiple service-impacting incidents … the nature of many of these outages is such that customers had no controls in order to mitigate the downtime," it said.

Google Cloud's efforts to attract more enterprise clients was hailed by Gartner, as well as the attraction its analytics and machine-learning capabilities present to these organisations.

The report outlined its "immaturity" of processes, which can sometimes make it a difficult company with which to transact, as well as its smaller pool of experienced MSP partners compared with other vendors in the quadrant.

"Enterprises often lament Google's inability to craft appropriate solutions for enterprise requirements when engaging with solution architects," the analyst said.

"Google is aggressively targeting these shortcomings."

Specialist providers

Alibaba, IBM and Oracle were placed in the Niche Players box as they are excellent providers for particular regions or use cases, but should be viewed as specialist IaaS providers, according to the report.

Alibaba is the cloud arm of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group.

Gartner criticised its international offering for not having the full set of capabilities as its native Chinese version.

It also caught flak for "limited capabilities" regarding its MSP ecosystem, third-party software integration and small global field teams outside China.

"Alibaba Cloud earns 90 per cent of its revenue in China and has not appreciably grown its enterprise customer base outside China," stated the report.

"Alibaba Cloud's financial losses are increasing and may prevent the company from continuing to invest in necessary expansions to serve international markets as the leading hyperscale provider."

Oracle's biggest strength is also its biggest weakness, according to the report.

Oracle Cloud IaaS (OCI) is primarily a foundation for its other business and applications, and it was praised for attracting talent from competitors and year-on-year customer growth.

"Oracle is unlikely to ever be viewed by the market as a general-purpose provider of integrated IaaS and PaaS offerings," said the analyst report.

"This is due to the dominance of the hyperscale providers, Oracle's late start with OCI and the polarising nature of Oracle in the minds of developers who often are the leading influencers for public cloud IaaS."

IBM was praised for being "well positioned" to assist its large customer base which is starting to adopt cloud services.

The vendor is not expected to threaten its larger competitors due to its failure to deliver on its "fundamental goal" of producing a new set of cloud IaaS offerings based on the principles of hyperscale architecture.

"IBM remains in a precarious position due to being slow to improve its cloud IaaS offerings, which are ultimately not competitive with the market leaders," the analyst said.