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Many corporations have begun to view public cloud infrastructure as a strategic asset. It is not enough for I&O executives to simply inquire:

“What does this cloud provider offer?”

“Why don’t we inquire about the capabilities of this cloud provider?”

Using this data, evaluate the hyperscale providers according to your company’s priorities.

Overview of the Market

Strategic cloud platform services are public cloud offerings that combine infrastructure services (such as computing, networks, and storage), platform services (such as managed application and data services), and transformation services (such as programs and resources that assist customers in adopting cloud-oriented IT delivery models). These features are standardized and automated, according to Gartner. The service provider owns the infrastructure and platform services, even if they may be housed in the data centers of customers or other providers. The ideal service would have a web interface and be accessible through programmable APIs; it would also be elastically expandable and billed by the use. Account teams and partners may facilitate controlled interactions and automated, self-service interfaces to implement transformation projects.
There are certain commonalities across corporate cloud experiences, but no two are identical. There are four main kinds of cloud trips that our clients go on, according to Gartner’s infographic “The Cloud Journey”:

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• Changes in technology
• Use of cloud-based services
• Revolution in the cloud
• Transforming businesses

Every path calls for a unique blend of digital transformation initiatives and cloud services. In order to make an informed decision, Gartner clients need to take stock of their current and future situations. Managed service providers (MSPs) and infrastructure/platform/software as a service (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS) are four of the numerous varieties of cloud service providers (CSPs) available today. However, there aren’t many strategic global hyperscalers that can meet any organization where they are, assist them in determining their future direction, and then deliver them the cloud services and transformation assistance they need to get there.

In order to help Gartner clients choose the best SCPS supplier for their company, we have created the SCPS Magic Quadrant. With the use of the Magic Quadrant, customers will be able to evaluate cloud service providers based on shared criteria and see how each one stacks up against a specific cloud migration. The SCPS Magic Quadrant is a tool that Gartner customers may utilize to:
Evaluate each service provider based on how well they meet your company’s needs in the areas that matter most.

Find the cloud service providers that best fit their needs, both now and in the future.
Find out what provider initiatives and services are available to aid with the organization’s digital transformation.

Support for enterprise- or cloud-native, mission-critical, large-scale production workloads is a must for SCPS providers’ public cloud IaaS and PaaS services. Features that are specific to first-party services and are available to the public must include:

• Computers, data storage, and networks that are software-defined and made available through an application programming interface (API) for web services
• Infrastructure services for software in the cloud that allow for automated management, including autoscaling and monitoring
• As a service database management platform
• A platform as a service for managed applications
• An international reach and scale (think: cloud datacenters located on several continents)
• Selling and billing based on measured consumption, elastic computing allows for the real-time provisioning and scaling of compute, network, storage, and platform services and capacity.
• A service resilience architecture that lets users automatically switch between several locations in the event of a failure by replicating resource settings and data across different provider zones and geographies.

Suppliers of SCPS should go above and above by providing additional infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) offerings in the following areas:

• Features like functions-as-a-service (FaaS) and serverless SQL or NoSQL databases are examples of serverless PaaS alternatives.
• freely accessible software development kits (SDKs) created by the company in three or more programming languages
• A distributed, always-available control plane that bolsters hyperscale designs
• Assisted with the administration of CI/CD services to facilitate the whole application and data management life cycles, which include automated integration, development, testing, and deployment.
• A Gartner-defined distributed cloud offering
• A publicized service-level agreement (SLA) covering at least 75% of all infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) offerings worldwide, with a service availability rate of at least 99.5% across all regions.
• The capacity to connect a customer’s on-premises data center infrastructure and essential IT services to the provider’s cloud platform
• Encryption, data protection, secret management, and identity and access management (IAM) controls allow users to safely engage with any service.

Cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) that has been preconfigured to accommodate typical traditional and specialist workloads. These include HPC, Oracle Database, Internet of Things (IoT), SAP, VMware, and non-x86.
Solutions for vertical industry platforms that cater to industry-specific requirements through data models, platform services, and partner ecosystems
Financial management solutions in the cloud that help clients plan for, monitor, control, and distribute cloud expenses

SCPS providers should also make accessible initiatives and resources that help their clients transition to the cloud for IT service delivery. Among them, you should find:

• A provider-subsidized strategic co-innovation service that helps businesses prepare for and execute cloud adoption over a one- to five-year period
• The process of moving data and resources to the cloud, together with tools for planning the move, evaluating applications automatically, determining the best size to use, and estimating costs
• A vast network of technological solution providers, managed service providers, and solution integrators operating on a worldwide scale is available. Customers should be able to use self-service tools to locate, assess, choose, and communicate with partners, and services should be able to certify partners with technical specializations and/or preferable status indications.
• Enterprise training and support, adoption frameworks and best practices, planning services, customer success evaluations, and globally available self-service resources are all part of what clients need to plan, construct, and maintain high-quality cloud systems.
• The provider environment may be seamlessly integrated with a digital software marketplace that offers a diverse selection of approved third-party software items.
• Data sovereignty choices, include backing for data residency regulations, the capacity to store and transport one’s own encryption keys, and the choice to deploy into autonomous zones and regions that are administered locally
• Services and technologies for managing energy and sustainability
• Coordinated policy administration that enables policy-as-code programming
• capabilities in artificial intelligence and machine learning, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) infrastructures, foundational models, and specialized hardware and tools for developing and utilizing AI and ML services
• Services and tools that facilitate more complex agile CI/CD approaches, such DataOps and GitOps
• Infrastructure for multicloud computing, comprising services and tools for integrating with other cloud providers’ offerings and for deploying provider services in other providers’ clouds
• Programs where the cloud service provider invests with other parties in a provider-partner or provider-customer venture, sharing in the expenses, risks, and potential returns.

The Four Corners of Perception of Gartner Cloud Platforms

The Strategic Cloud Platform Services Magic Quadrant (Figure 1)

Advantages and Risks of the Vendor Cloud Platforms Services

The Alibaba Cloud

Within this Magic Quadrant, Alibaba Cloud has a niche position. Alibaba Cloud’s global offering is the basis for Gartner’s evaluation. Alibaba Cloud is in a prime position to assist Chinese firms in “going global” by using Alibaba’s worldwide cloud infrastructure, thanks to its dominant position in the Chinese market. On the other hand, not all of Alibaba Cloud’s features are accessible outside of China, even if the platform has more than its Chinese rivals.
Alibaba Group, the parent business, announced in March 2023 that it will spin out its Alibaba Cloud division into Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, a new independent company. Without its former parent company’s direct assistance, Cloud Intelligence Group may find it difficult to compete on an international scale.

Strengths of Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud’s global influence is a direct result of its dominant position in the Greater China market and its prominence in the cloud computing industry there. The company’s leadership in China’s open-source community and robust partner ecosystem give it an advantage in neighboring markets like Southeast Asia.
Alibaba Cloud’s private cloud solutions, container management services, and custom-designed ASICs are all examples of the company’s engineering prowess, which is borne out by its hybrid architecture. Alibaba Cloud’s data centers now have a higher power use effectiveness (PUE) rating, thanks to their sustainability designs.
In order to enable digital ecosystems, Alibaba Cloud uses the might of its parent company, Alibaba Group, to provide digital business solutions that its rivals just can’t match. Included in this category are well-known online services like Alipay and DingTalk, as well as access to the Alibaba commerce network. Chinese enterprises looking to expand their reach into global markets find these qualities appealing.

Weakness of Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud began a small-scale round of layoffs in May 2023 as it separated from its parent business, creating a climate of strategic uncertainty. Some consumers and investors are wondering about the future of Alibaba Cloud due to the CEO’s abrupt departure in September after just eight months on the job, as well as the absence of a definite strategy for public or private funding.
Global service offerings and support are inconsistent. A lot of the cloud services that Alibaba Cloud offers in China aren’t available or are only offered in certain places outside of China. Alibaba Cloud has a small number of overseas operations and provides online help in English and Mandarin for customers outside of China. The company also has a weak presence in foreign sales and partnerships.
Alibaba Cloud’s worldwide infrastructure may have trouble keeping up with its Western cloud competitors due to trade limitations on critical technology like ARM designs and NVIDIA GPUs. As a result, the performance of Alibaba Cloud’s data centers outside of China may suffer. Furthermore, there are a few bespoke Alibaba chips that have never been published abroad or are only available in restricted numbers. These include the Yitian 710 and the Hanguang 800.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

One of the leaders in this Magic Quadrant is Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is a division of Amazon.com. When it comes to cloud computing, AWS is your one-stop shop for IaaS and PaaS for any imaginable IT use case. The workload transfer and modernization initiatives offered by AWS are the main means by which the company helps its corporate clients with digital transformation. Instead of putting a lot of effort into corporate SaaS, AWS would rather handle most use cases for business applications through its partner ecosystem.
As it has expanded profitably year after year, AWS has maintained its dominant position in the worldwide IaaS+PaaS market, which is above 40%. Database and analytics services, as well as AI/ML, are major factors propelling expansion. In order to further its generative AI approach, AWS has now announced a cooperation with Anthropic.

Strengths of Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a wide variety of cloud infrastructure and platform services, which are frequently more advanced than those of its rivals. The market is often shaped by the standards and prices set by core AWS services, which additional vendors then follow.
In terms of hardware design, AWS made history when it introduced its Nitro System, which used hardware offload to accelerate speed and improve security, and when it developed its own ARM-based chipsets. Compared to providers that depend entirely on third-party components, AWS may have a cost and efficiency advantage due to the widespread utilization of these technologies throughout AWS infrastructure.
The AWS partner programs continue to place a heavy emphasis on partner technical enablement, and the AWS partner channels for systems integrators and managed service providers (MSPs) are well-established and capable. Among digital marketplaces for third-party cloud applications, AWS Marketplace stands head and shoulders above the competition.

Weaknesses of Amazon Web Services

Among the leading hyperscalers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) stands out for failing to provide customers with the resources they need to effectively implement multicloud scenarios. According to a recent survey by Gartner, several public cloud providers are relied upon by 76% of commercial IaaS and PaaS clients.
The AWS sales field and the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) frequently stress a “move now, modernize later” strategy that prioritizes the rapid onboarding of clients onto AWS at the expense of proper planning and execution. Customers that fail to update their workloads after migration may end up holding on to AWS legacy assets without the flexibility or savings they were hoping for.
Customers may be hesitant to purchase from AWS because of the company’s track record of releasing services that compete with its ecosystem partners. AWS Managed Services is one example of how the company competes with its own service channel by giving migration tools, incentives for users to transfer from partner database solutions, and managed services for popular open-source packages.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

In this Magic Quadrant, we find Google, a division of Alphabet Inc. Almost every use case for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) can be met by Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Businesses interested in migrating from on-premises to container-or serverless-based infrastructure are GCP’s target customers. In order to take advantage of Google’s advancements in artificial intelligence and big data, organizations may benefit most from GCP if they adopt Google’s opinionated approach to cloud architecture.
The original focus of GCP’s growth was on clients creating cloud-native apps from the ground up. Its Rapid Migration Program (RaMP) continues to prioritize application modernization and agile approaches above other cloud migration efforts. With a 40% increase in 2022, GCP’s market share is currently above 10%.

Strengths of Google Cloud Platform

Google has applied its fundamental design ideas more uniformly throughout its portfolio of IaaS and PaaS services, which has contributed to its elegant design, in comparison to its competitors. According to cloud engineers who spoke with Gartner, GCP APIs are noticeably more user-friendly and consistent.
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) with artificial intelligence (AI) integration: Google is a frontrunner in the creation of both internal and external models, including well-known large-language models like PaLM 2. Its Vertex AI toolkit also facilitates the integration of models from third parties. Core Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) offerings from Google are starting to use Google’s concepts.
In terms of environmental impact, GCP ranks higher than any of the other service providers in this coveted Magic Quadrant. Customers whose energy supplies or costs are unpredictable, as well as those whose cloud operations, like training AI models, use a lot of energy, should prioritize data center energy efficiency.

Weaknesses of Google Cloud Platform

Release cadence for general availability (GA): Google often releases services in preview mode and promotes them heavily in the market without committing to a specific date for GA. Customers should exercise caution when planning to install the “latest and greatest” GCP services in production.
Partner and field maturity is not uniform: Google has more than 70 accredited migration partners and an increasing customer migration program (RaMP). Nevertheless, some clients still complain to Gartner about how their Google Cloud migration project was delayed due to unavailability of the Google account staff or a lack of extensive partner knowledge with GCP.
There is a lack of strong connectivity between Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Google’s other cloud-based assets (such as Workspace), and the other products of Alphabet, parent company of Google. Customers looking to use GCP as a base for building digital solutions across Google’s offerings may have to negotiate commercial terms with various Google business divisions and may not find any out-of-the-box help at the moment.

The Huawei Cloud

This Magic Quadrant shows that Huawei Cloud is operating in a niche market. While China remains Huawei Cloud’s primary market, the company has expanded into various Asian, African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern regions through its worldwide offering in recent years. Enterprises of all sizes, particularly those leaning toward hybrid IT solutions, are Huawei’s typical clientele.
One of Huawei Cloud’s primary investment goals is to grow into new markets where it can compete with other top Chinese cloud providers. Improving its services that facilitate application development was one of Huawei Cloud’s primary areas of focus during the last year.

Strengths of Huawei Cloud

Unlike any other worldwide competitor, Huawei Cloud has a distinct plan to get into markets outside of China. In order to create strategic cloud alliances, it uses its current telecom-based sales relations to access new and underserved foreign cloud markets. Because of this, Huawei Cloud has been able to develop a small but expanding footprint in the aforementioned regions: Latin America, the MENA, and Southeast Asia.
The care and assistance that clients receive from Huawei Cloud in areas like as contracting, integration and implementation, continuous service and support, and presales assessment has led to high levels of satisfaction among international customers.
Thanks to its reputable brand and history of success with telecom customers, Huawei Cloud has a proven track record of serving major business clients globally. This puts Huawei in a better position to take advantage of hybrid cloud potential and offers Huawei Cloud a sales edge over its primary Chinese competitors in certain foreign markets.

Weaknesses of Huawei Cloud

Sanctions at the international level: Sanctions at the international level still affect Huawei’s business as usual, making it harder for Huawei Cloud to get its hands on components and markets. Business owners in such areas will need to consider the pros and cons of forming a strategic alliance with Huawei very carefully.
Product clarity and general openness: There is a lack of comprehensive service documentation compared to other cloud leaders, and a lot of services are region-limited. Because Huawei Cloud has made contradictory claims about the profitability of its cloud services on occasion, it is difficult to determine how successful the company’s business has been.
In its early stages, Huawei Cloud’s network of consulting and channel partners is small and concentrated in Asia. Even the third-party offerings marketplace on Huawei Cloud isn’t very extensive.

IBM – Big Blue Cloud

This Magic Quadrant shows IBM as a Niche Player. IBM Cloud is a globally dispersed business that primarily provides infrastructure as a service (IaaS), container, and data-related services. Ever since IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019, Red Hat OpenShift has been the backbone of IBM’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) products. Hybrid and distributed clouds, regulated sectors, and industry-specific cloud services are areas where IBM is putting its money. Its typical customer is a large or medium-sized business that has already invested in other IBM technology.
The IBM go-to-market strategy differs from the other competitors in this Magic Quadrant because it gives clients the choice to get full solution outcomes through service engagements with IBM Consulting or local partners.

Strengths of IBM Cloud

Industries with stringent regulations, such as the banking sector, have specific needs, and IBM has developed solutions to address those needs. To enable automatic compliance and security posture for the most critical workloads, IBM Cloud for Financial Services, for instance, comes with predefined control sets.
Support for older and non-x86 applications: With four different ways to buy and use it, IBM Cloud offers one of the most comprehensive VMware-based packages available. IBM Z mainframe systems technologies, such as LinuxONE and z/OS (the latter of which is reserved for development and test workloads), as well as classic IBM architectures, are all supported by IBM Cloud.
Manage containers across many clouds using IBM’s container management solution, which is based on Red Hat OpenShift. This popular platform allows users to easily apply their container strategy across various cloud environments. OpenShift is an integral part of IBM’s cloud strategy and the backbone of the company’s software delivery on providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure via its co-branded products.

Weaknesses of IBM Cloud

Improvements in dependability were a top priority for IBM in 2021 and 2022, and they paid off: the number of disruptive occurrences dropped significantly. Despite these enhancements, IBM Cloud still lacks the resilience architecture of competing strategic cloud platform services (SCPS) providers, and the number of IBM multizone regions (MZRs) is still somewhat small.
Despite releasing IBM Cloud VPC Gen2 in 2019, the company is still selling, supporting, and improving IBM Cloud Classic, which is part of Gen1, which contributes to the lack of a unified cloud architecture. Furthermore, IBM Cloud VPC requires the purchase and deployment of dedicated cloud management solutions like Instana and Turbonomic, none of which are completely integrated into the IBM Cloud Management Console.
Not much help from MSPs: Big names in cloud management don’t really back IBM Cloud up. Customers that want IBM Cloud managed transformation and operations services must either work with regional partners or develop in-house expertise in this area.

Microsoft – Azure Cloud

According to this Magic Quadrant, Microsoft is at the top. Although it excels in every scenario, Microsoft Azure is a great fit for hybrid cloud strategies implemented by Microsoft-centric enterprises. For small and medium-sized businesses all around the world, Microsoft is the obvious choice because to its extensive global partner channel.
All three of these areas—IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS—are receiving investments from Microsoft. Four more cloud offerings—Power Platform, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and GitHub—are built on top of Azure. Microsoft also has substantial holdings in OpenAI, a pioneer in generative AI. Customers seeking to collaborate with a single supplier may find this complicated and cross-integrated strategy appealing, while customers aiming to exploit distinct Azure services independently of the whole Microsoft portfolio may find it challenging to navigate.

Strengths of Azure Cloud

With the help of Azure Arc, Microsoft is gradually expanding Azure Resource Manager’s capabilities to manage a diverse range of resources in the cloud, across multiple clouds, and on-premises, facilitating hybrid and multicloud transition. Customers of Microsoft may utilize Azure for the administration and security of private cloud and noncloud resources through Arc-enabled solutions for VMware vSphere and for physical servers from conventional OEMs.
Competencies for developers: While not every Microsoft developer service is “best of breed,” the Azure developer portfolio as a whole performs well in several areas, such as cloud-native app development, legacy modernization, data processing, and artificial intelligence. It would be remiss of me to overlook Azure’s connections with Microsoft’s other developer-oriented clouds, Power Platform and GitHub, even if they are beyond the purview of this Magic Quadrant.
Azure key partnerships: SAP, Oracle, Dell, and VMware are IT incumbents; Epic and AT&T are industry vertical leaders; and OpenAI is an emerging digital leader. Microsoft has been able to and has been willing to deal with a broad spectrum of industry leaders. Businesses that want to digitally change utilizing technology from many top vendors need this kind of flexibility.

Weaknesses of Azure Cloud

The Azure outage in Singapore in January 2023 demonstrated that uneven operating procedures and failover designs are still problems in some locations, despite Microsoft’s continuous attempts to address these concerns with resilience and security. Over the previous two years, researchers have also revealed critical security flaws in Azure. Microsoft is actively attempting to improve its security posture and promote a culture that prioritizes security.
Technology lock-in and cross-service dependencies: A lot of clients of Gartner have complained about how Azure services are designed to “work best” with one other, making it hard to monitor how much Azure is used in an account. Customers frequently experience unexpected spikes in their Azure bill when the financial implications of utilizing a new Azure service just to satisfy the demands of another Azure service are not clearly communicated to them.
The quality of Microsoft’s partner network and unified support is inconsistent; nonetheless, these resources should be available for all of Microsoft’s products, not only Azure. When it comes to ensuring that the Unified Support team and Azure Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) network are technically qualified, Microsoft is behind other industry leaders.

Oracle – OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure)

This Magic Quadrant has Oracle at the top. Through its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) provides support for all kinds of x86-based IT workloads. Oracle stands out from its competitors in the market because to its extensive range of distributed and sovereign cloud solutions, aggressive infrastructure as a service pricing, multicloud services, and improved support for Oracle Applications.
In the past, OCI has increased its market share by targeting Oracle clients, capitalizing on Oracle’s dominance in the database and ERP industries. The past two years, nevertheless, have seen an uptick in OCI’s own clientele. To further its generative AI approach, Oracle has now announced a cooperation with Cohere.

Strengths of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)

Oracle dominates the industry when it comes to distributed and sovereign cloud computing innovations. Oracle has the capability to implement a variety of regions, including public, private, disconnected, sovereign cloud, private in client data centers, and partner-operated regions. Given the strict legal and data protection standards, this range of solutions is highly important to consumers.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) now provides Oracle-managed database services in both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, in addition to high-performance connectivity with Azure in some locations. With these features plus OCI’s data connectivity and multicloud application technologies, many clients find it easier to set up OCI as a “second cloud” next to their current main provider.
When compared to the industry leaders in hyperscale cloud capabilities, Oracle is now in direct competition due to its remarkable year-over-year rate of feature launches. Cloud consumers require middleware and integration platform as a service (iPaaS) services, data integration, and database management systems (both operational and analytical). Oracle is showing dominance in all of these areas.

Weaknesses of Oracle Cloud

When compared to other industry leaders in cloud computing, OCI’s approach to generative AI is immature and its message is understated, resulting in limited GenAI capabilities. Although OCI has a strong relationship with NVIDIA, their AI infrastructure is not yet market-differentiated, whereas Oracle’s connection with Cohere is focused on database and Fusion solutions.
One of the most popular region architectures used by Oracle typically has a single availability domain (AD) that has three fault domains, which limits the possibilities for resilience. There is a lack of alternatives for companies planning to create high-availability architectures with multi-AD or multiregion failover since relatively few OCI regions currently contain more than one AD.
Disparity in customer service and sales: Oracle’s OCI sales force uses its strong relationships with other Oracle business units to better manage customers’ interactions with the company. This has both positive and negative consequences for business cloud clients. According to Gartner, many of these customers are hesitant to commit to OCI because they are concerned about Oracle’s conventional sales practices.

Cloud computing by Tencent

This Magic Quadrant is where Tencent Cloud fits in as a Niche Player. Multinationals with operations in China and Chinese businesses looking to grow internationally continue to be Tencent Cloud’s primary emphasis. Tencent stands out from the competition because to its dedication to cloud-native services, which power its commercial cloud business and many other divisions inside Tencent Holdings.
By supporting some of the biggest social media and gaming installations in the world, Tencent’s international cloud offering proves that it can handle difficulties related to size and performance. Its emphasis has shifted from gaming and social workloads to other areas of information technology, and it has only recently reset.

Strengths of Tencent Cloud

Capabilities for distributed scale-out platforms: Tencent Cloud has created a suite of services to cater to clients that want high-performance networking, scale-out application architecture, and processing of rich media. Entertainment, gaming, social networking, and online commerce are just a few of the numerous domains that might benefit from these capabilities.
Incentive pricing: Tencent Cloud provides private pricing that is both flexible and fast to decide on exceptions and reductions for bigger clients. Special incentives for service utilization are available to core customers in some locations.
Tencent is well-positioned to attract multinational corporations that are willing to commit strategically to its platform because of its emphasis on offering high-touch assistance to its big, high-value customers.

Weaknesses for Tencent Cloud

Due to its erratic market performance in recent years, Tencent has shifted its attention back to the gaming sector from general cloud customers. But Tencent has now returned its focus to regular cloud users. If Tencent fails to make a splash in the newly targeted areas, enterprises will have to keep an eye on how stable this new strategy is.
Restricted ecosystem: Compared to other providers in our research, Tencent Cloud’s partner programs are not as extensive or comprehensive. Finding partners to collaborate with Tencent Cloud will be challenging for clients outside of China.
Little traction: Compared to the other two Chinese suppliers in this research, Tencent Cloud’s year-over-year market share improvements remain extremely low. Organisations need to keep an eye on this to see how it affects Tencent’s capacity to meet their needs in the future.

Choosing Which Public Cloud Provider to Include and Who to Leave Out

The most important providers and their products are identified and analyzed for Gartner clients through Critical Capabilities and Magic Quadrant research. To help identify the most relevant providers in a market, Gartner employs a default upper limit of 20 providers. When the intended research value to our clients would be lessened if the maximum limit were not exceeded by Gartner Methodologies, this may happen on occasion. According to the analysts, certain qualities are required for inclusion in this study, and these are the inclusion criteria.
Providers of cloud services must fulfill these requirements in order to be included in the Strategic Cloud Platform Services Magic Quadrant.
In order to be eligible for market participation, a supplier must:

• You can provide public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) alone, without the need for managed services (such as guest operating system administration), or you can package it with managed hosting, application development, application maintenance, or any other type of outsourcing.
• Use their own or leased infrastructure to host their IaaS and PaaS services. Although customers’ data centers can house the technology for distributed cloud IaaS and PaaS services, the provider is still legally responsible for owning and managing the services.

Progression and traction in the market: In order to qualify, a supplier must:

• Provide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) in the cloud via public cloud regions that include data centers on three or more continents that have been audited by an organization with an ISO 27001 certification or an equivalent designation. In each instance, Gartner is scrutinizing the worldwide cloud service that a SCPS provider delivers, which can differ from the service that a provider provides to clients in its own nation.
• One option is to have a publicly available cloud IaaS+PaaS offering that has been around for at least three years. The other is to have a minimum of $1 billion in revenue in 2022, with $250 million of that coming from countries other than the provider’s home country. This revenue should be calculated directly from sales of the offering, not including managed or professional services.
• Alternatively, you can have a public cloud IaaS+PaaS offering that has been available to the public for less than three years and generate at least $500 million in revenue in 2022 (i.e., from sales of the offering, not including managed or professional services). By the end of 2022, your revenue growth rate should be at least 40%.

Competencies important to Gartner's client businesses: 

• In order to be considered, service providers must:
• It is expected that you can handle invoicing, provide consolidated billing, and create unique contracts with clients all over the world.
• Keep a presence on three or more continents with sales and service offices.
• A least of two languages should be available for customer service at all times, including phone help.
• Provide contract, service portal, documentation, and support language localization (at least two languages available).

Help your clients learn the ins and outs of cloud computing and move their IT departments to the cloud by providing them with tools and services that they can use for free or for a small price.
Additional programs and services to help customers with digital transformation, automation of business processes, creation of digital products and business models, and organizational or cultural changes to make teams and employees more digitally adept are optional.
Providers must, at the very least, achieve the following technical requirements for market participation in order to be considered relevant to Gartner clients:

• Provide access to a web services API for software-defined computing, storage, and networking as part of their infrastructure as a service offerings.
• Providers of platform as a service (PaaS) solutions include those that handle both applications and databases. There has to be support for both relational and nonrelational databases in the managed database PaaS alternatives.

Allow infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) services and capacity to be elastically provisioned and scaled in real-time, with billing and sales based on metering consumption.
Provide cloud services that allow for automated administration of infrastructure, including autoscaling and monitoring as a minimum.
Make available a service level agreement (SLA) for at least 75% of their infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) offerings across all regions, and ensure that each service is available at least 99.5% of the time.
Provide a service resilience architecture that lets clients automatically fail over to a different location if necessary and duplicate resource settings and data across provider zones and regions.

Having an ambitious agenda and providing a service that is fit for strategic adoption are two ways leaders stand apart. Their versatility means they can cover a lot of ground, but they aren’t perfect, they might not be the greatest fit for your unique requirements, and they might not even be able to handle some use cases. The industry leaders in this space have a significant amount of clients who can attest to their performance and a substantial portion of the market share.
Prospective opponents
There are certain demands in the industry right now that challengers can fill. They have a history of successful delivery and provide a high-quality solution tailored to a specific set of use cases. But they either lack a wide-ranging goal or aren’t responding fast enough to market problems.

Visionaries in Public Cloud

Some people are investing a lot of money into creating new technologies because they have a lofty goal for the future. Their offerings are still in the early stages of development, and they have several features in the works that are not accessible to the public just yet. They may have a lot of paying clients, but they might not be able to handle a wide variety of use cases quite yet, or they might only be available in a certain area.

Specialist Organizations

Strategic cloud platform services (SCPS) niche players may excel at serving certain use cases or geographic areas, but in the end, they should just be considered specialists in their field. Their roadmaps aren’t often very ambitious or they don’t adequately support a wide variety of use cases. Although they may have established themselves as leaders in neighboring markets, others may have struggled to build up their SCPS capabilities.
Context
Every business has the option to use public cloud services, but no two cloud migrations are ever the same. Our customers go through four main kinds of cloud journeys, according to Gartner:

• Changes in technology
• Use of cloud-based services
• Revolution in the cloud
• Transforming businesses

Every path calls for a unique blend of digital transformation initiatives and cloud services. In order to make an informed decision, cloud users need to know their current and future situations. Furthermore, in order to get the most out of their strategic influence, clients should manage their relationship with their supplier.

This SCPS Magic Quadrant expands on previous Gartner assessments of cloud infrastructure and platform services (CIPS) by further assessing providers based on their capacity to assist clients in using cloud infrastructure to expedite and revolutionize their IT operations and businesses. By using this tool, customers are able to compare and contrast providers based on shared criteria and see how each provider’s unique selling points relate to their specific cloud journey.
Users of Gartner’s SCPS Magic Quadrant can do the following:

• Evaluate each service provider based on the criteria that are most relevant to their company.
• Find the cloud service providers that best fit their needs, both now and in the future.
• Discover the many initiatives and tools available to providers that are looking to update and revamp their business.

Market Synopsis

The term “cloud computing” refers to a method of running computer systems that makes use of the internet to provide users with access to elastic and scalable information technology resources. The services are provided by public cloud providers using shared data center infrastructure that they own or manage. In this model, several customers share the same pool of capacity, and each customer’s environment is software-virtually and logically segregated from the others. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) providers in the public cloud primarily provide services related to infrastructure (compute, network storage), application platforms, and databases.
The market for “cloud infrastructure and platform services,” which Gartner calls the integrated delivery of public cloud IaaS and PaaS, was one of the fastest-growing cloud market sectors in 2022, with a global market value of $168 billion and a growth rate of 29.2 percent. Cloud providers are increasingly developing integrated offers that mix different IaaS and PaaS services, which has led to a gradual merging of the market’s technological architectures and use cases for these services. This trend is mirrored by Gartner’s independent tracking of the IaaS and PaaS markets.
This Magic Quadrant study focuses on the SCPS market sector, which is the portion of the CIPS industry that is controlled by the world’s largest cloud providers. For a number of years, these suppliers have been the focal point of the CIPS market. More than 97% of the whole CIPS market is now controlled by these eight leading SCPS vendors.

In an effort to establish themselves as the leading strategic providers of IT infrastructure and platform services, the SCPS providers are vying for a larger share of the global business IT workloads and investment budgets. Every single SCPS supplier is able to sell, support, and provide a vast array of services to customers all over the world. Nevertheless, every supplier has their own special way of doing things, and their services, programs, and network of partners all have their own set of advantages and disadvantages.

Customers may want to prevent vendor lock-in by using a multiprovider cloud approach, but most IT companies can’t handle mastering and using more than a few of providers at the moment. Choosing a cloud provider is thus a very strategic endeavor. A company’s success or failure for the foreseeable future is highly dependent on the supplier it chooses. In order to choose the best cloud provider, clients nowadays are looking beyond technical specs to see how effectively each vendor can be a long-term cloud computing partner.