GoogleSoft may have dropped big on CapEx, but it's Amazon that is raking in the green
Posted on 08/20/2013 11:17:55 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
The magic quadrant is Gartner's way of ranking technologies, and sees the analyst firm plop companies into four cubes, split by an x axis representing "completeness of vision", and a y axis for "ability to execute". Good technology is up and to the right, bad technology is down and to the left. Strange it may seem, but Magic Quadrant rankings matter an awful lot as they give companies the chance to sling an easily understandable diagram in front of some MBA-educated executive and point to their company's name and say, "You see, Mr. Exeutive, we're here and the others are all down there, so clearly you're going to want to go with us for your mission-critical IT" – or so we imagine.
The infernal infrastructure-as-a-service magic quadrant report was published by Gartner on Monday, and marks Amazon as a "leader" of cloud technologies, trailed by CSC, and with other companies such as Microsoft and Rackspace hovering around the so-so center. IBM, meanwhile, languishes in the bottom left corner, highlighting the gulf of expertise between the old IT companies and the predatory customer-focused guile of Amazon.
Other evaluated companies included HP, GoGrid, SoftLayer, Fujitsu, Virtustream, Tier 3, and Joyent in the "niche player" section, and Dimension Data, Savvis, and Terremark in the top left "challenger" section.
Rackspace sat at the dead center of the chart, and in its report Gartner gave the company's tech a mild drubbing, but praised its "outstanding" marketing. Rackspace's marketing costs jumped 26.5 percent in the company's most recent financial quarter, while the company saw its margins fall as it got into a bloody price war with Amazon.
One eye-brow raising fact to creep out of the quadrant is the scale at which AWS operates, which dwarfs deep-pocketed rivals including Microsoft.
"AWS is the overwhelming market share leader, with more than five times the compute capacity in use than the aggregate total of the other fourteen providers in this Magic Quadrant," the report says. "It has by far the largest pool of capacity, which makes its service one of the few suitable for batch computing, especially for workloads that require short-term provisioning of hundreds of servers at a time."
This figure reflects the amount of revenue-generating IT assets both real and intangible – cores, VMs, provisioned RAM, et cetera – in use by the providers, Gartner research vice president (and author of the report) Lydia Leong tells The Register.
It also indicates that although capital expenditures are a good indicator of the possible potential scale of a cloud provider, they can't tell you anything about utilization.
GoogleSoft may have dropped big on CapEx, but it's Amazon that is raking in the green
Though the financial results of major cloud operators indicate that Google and Microsoft have outspent Amazon on capital expenditures (pictured), the Gartner findings show that Amazon is the one approaching higher asset utilization for cloud.
To assemble the quadrant, Gartner analysts used customer references, hands-on trials of service offerings, public information from cloud providers, surveys of over 75 cloud providers, and an unspecified number of candid service-provider interviews.
The market at the moment may be defined by Amazon, but Gartner expects a more competitive cloud-computing marketplace in a year or so, pointing to the surprising success of Microsoft, the coming general availability of IaaS, and IBM's integration of SoftLayer as all signs that "this market is becoming considerably more competitive".
Unless, of course, the NSA spying revelations snuff it out entirely and we witness the Balkanization of cloud into distinct legislative and political regions. But if that happens, it's going to take a few months for us to get the data in the coming financial quarters of the megaclouds. ®
Yup, use the cloud so that virtually everyone has potential access to your data.
Cloud users are comparable to GM executives...clueless to such an extent that scientific notation is required to adequately express their stupidity.
Its funny that you think corp datacenters are any more secure
The only stuff I have out there are my boring smugmug albums and mediocre stock footage.
all gibberish to me.
An old saw comes to mind: "If you can't baffle them with brilliance, befuddle them with bullshit".
That said, I'm not sure what this guy is trying to say either -- sure sounds impressive, though! Basically, it appears that amazon has more capital investment in 'cloud' services than many companies that are dedicated cloud infrastructure providers. Given their head-start and continuing lead in the field, that's not that surprising.
I'm not evangelical about Amazon. Cloud storage is basically a commodity, and if you're depending on the vendor for security you're doing it wrong anyway.
Here’s a little excerpt toward the end of “Alas, Brave New Babylon.”
The man-machine social engine believed that it had become God, but all man-made constructions are imperfect. The bridge to the future supporting humanity’s billions of lives was built of pixie dust suspended in the ether by magnetism. It all shattered to atoms when the props were kicked out from under the whirling techno-machine, and we all had to live on what we could grow or raise within our eyesight without murdering each other.
It had to happen sooner or later, and sooner, it happened. We couldn’t even pump clean drinking water without electricity. We were like a happy moon base that sprang a fatal leak to the vacuum of space. Electricity was the oxygen we breathed, and without our technology, we died in our spacesuits like stranded cosmonauts on abandoned space stations.
The primary lesson that I have learned over the past three years is that it is much harder to build and to sustain a stable and functioning civilization (even an admittedly imperfect one) than it is to destroy a pretty damn good civilization in the name of establishing utopian perfection by government decree.
Modern mankind’s quest for utopian perfection was a form of mass delusion. Computers lent a veneer of artificial wisdom, but they were simply powerful yet fragile tools, tools which extended our society far out over a worst-case precipice. In the end the price of computerized perfection was all or nothing, and in the pursuit of all, we wound up with nothing. The glittering screens were pretty while they lasted, but they turned into broken glass in our bitter hands.
“Cloud” is marketing gibberish for “The hosted managed services you rejected in the 1990’s because we wouldn’t provide automatic failures and backups are rebranded as the “cloud” as we now include redundancy and backups.”
The “cloud” moniker came from Visio diagrams that depicted the Internet as a cloud. It really is a retarded concept.
The cloud, after. From ABNB
We were a generation too busy staring at glittering pleasure screens even to reproduce, until the moment that the fantasy windows winked to black and reality crashed down. A great truth was learned, too late: pixels, bytes, and digits do not endure when the networks driving them explode in clouds of zeros and ones and disappear forever.
CT, you hit the nail right on the head regarding reliablility factors and cloud services. As I am always telling clients, "How solid is a cloud"?
A company I contract for had subcontracted cloud services to provide terminal services and DB hosts for its customers, and it had an outage in January that didn't 'fail over', as the cognescenti like to say. Their customers, who could not afford so much as five minutes of downtime, suffered close to a week. Of course, all that hate and discontent trickled down very quickly, and all parties involved took a fierce kick right between the goalposts. As for me, I was always well out of blast range.
I hate it when I'm right. And on matters such as this, I find myself right almost daily. It's not rocket science; not really.
If the global cisco network ever crashes hard, it’ll sure get interesting fast.
I always ask: “Just what technologies do cloud companies use that you do not have access to yourself? They are simply using those technologies and you are simply trusting they will do so without fail.”
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