Rackspace, Dimension Data, and others that were in last year's Challenger quadrant became Niche Players: Agree/ Disagree
Gartner's Magic Quadrant 2014 for cloud computing places Amazon and Microsoft as leaders. Rackspace, Dimension Data, and others that were in last year's Challenger quadrant became this year's Niche Players - agree or disagree?
Part of the reason for the change is that Gartner split the Magic Quadrants into two Magic Quadrants this year. One for native IaaS cloud infrastructure and one for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting. Rackspace lead the market in the latter which is closer to where they have been trying to position themselves.
Infrastructure Expert at Cloud Counselage Inc. (www.cloudcounselage.com)
Consultant
Aug 20, 2014
DISAGREE.
VMware is the present and the Future. Be it VMware vCloud and vSphere suites, tough competition for Amazon etc. or be it vCHS. Also, VMware's very own Public IaaS Cloud; vCHS (VMware vCloud Hybrid Service) which will change everything in days to come vis-a-vis Rackspace, IBM's Softlayer etc. Microsoft is not in a competition at all, because it lacks quality compared to the names mentioned above. __Tushar Topale
I completely agree. Cloud Computing vending is a scale business. And unless you have the $$ Billions to invest in DCs, interconnects, CDN capacity, as well as in continually investing in the OS and Management software infrastructure, you cannot be anything but a vendor that caters to a particular narrow segment.
Its a bit like telephony. You aren't going to do very well going up against GE/Sprint, ATT or Southwest Telecom. BUT if you are an EarthLink, you can play in then niche space of those who want a "socially responsible" Telco.
About a year ago, both Rackspace and Centurylink were looking for "capital partners" for future growth investment precisely because of these issues. I don't think they ever raised enough $$.
I have been saying for about 5 years now that there is room for 4-5 major cloud vendors and they were going to be:
Amazon, Google, Microsoft. and then fighting for the last 1-2 slots were
IBM, salesFORCE.com, EMC and perhaps Oracle. Oracle seems to have opted not to keep fighting, and EMC is now more focused on delivering services.
So you basically have IBM leveraging its corporate DC and mainframe hardware consolidation capabilities and Salesforce is leverging its lead in CRM to get apps built on Force.com
But pretty much everyone else is a niche player. The Future is Platform As A Service. NOT "vms" and Rackspace and Dimension Data all were hoping to move from VMs to PaaS but that's a hard move to make.
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Agree. All those are not true cloud player but somewhere in between hosted cloud and true cloud computing.
Part of the reason for the change is that Gartner split the Magic Quadrants into two Magic Quadrants this year. One for native IaaS cloud infrastructure and one for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting. Rackspace lead the market in the latter which is closer to where they have been trying to position themselves.
DISAGREE.
VMware is the present and the Future. Be it VMware vCloud and vSphere suites, tough competition for Amazon etc. or be it vCHS. Also, VMware's very own Public IaaS Cloud; vCHS (VMware vCloud Hybrid Service) which will change everything in days to come vis-a-vis Rackspace, IBM's Softlayer etc. Microsoft is not in a competition at all, because it lacks quality compared to the names mentioned above. __Tushar Topale
I completely agree. Cloud Computing vending is a scale business. And unless you have the $$ Billions to invest in DCs, interconnects, CDN capacity, as well as in continually investing in the OS and Management software infrastructure, you cannot be anything but a vendor that caters to a particular narrow segment.
Its a bit like telephony. You aren't going to do very well going up against GE/Sprint, ATT or Southwest Telecom. BUT if you are an EarthLink, you can play in then niche space of those who want a "socially responsible" Telco.
About a year ago, both Rackspace and Centurylink were looking for "capital partners" for future growth investment precisely because of these issues. I don't think they ever raised enough $$.
I have been saying for about 5 years now that there is room for 4-5 major cloud vendors and they were going to be:
Amazon, Google, Microsoft. and then fighting for the last 1-2 slots were
IBM, salesFORCE.com, EMC and perhaps Oracle. Oracle seems to have opted not to keep fighting, and EMC is now more focused on delivering services.
So you basically have IBM leveraging its corporate DC and mainframe hardware consolidation capabilities and Salesforce is leverging its lead in CRM to get apps built on Force.com
But pretty much everyone else is a niche player. The Future is Platform As A Service. NOT "vms" and Rackspace and Dimension Data all were hoping to move from VMs to PaaS but that's a hard move to make.