Gartner recently announced their Magic Quadrant for Cloud IaaS and Web Hosting Providers that met pre-defined criteria:
- They must sell on-demand hosting as a stand-alone service, without the requirement to bundle it with application development, application maintenance or other outsourcing.
- Their services must be enterprise-class, offering 24/7 customer support (including phone support), SLAs, and the ability to scale an application beyond the capacity of a single server.
- They must have significant market presence, as indicated by Web-hosting-related revenue of at least $50 million in 2009, or an on-demand hosting revenue run rate of at least $25 million in 2010.
- They must have demonstrable global presence. They must have reference customers in North America, Western Europe and Asia. They must have data centers in North America as well as either Western Europe or Asia, or they must derive at least 20% of their hosting revenue from customers outside the region in which they have their headquarters.
The report identifies two broad customer types, the first being web hosting customers and the second are early adopters of Cloud IaaS services.Gartner predicts that these two markets will fully converge in the next 5 years when providers will offer single unified architecture with multiple tiers of service quality in place of multiple platforms.
This report followed Gartner's 2011 CIO Agenda Survey titled "Reimagine IT: the 2011 Agenda" which includes responses from 2,014 CIOs representing more than $160 billion in corporate and public-sector IT spending across 50 countries and 38 industries. The results of the survey clearly indicate that over the next 5 years, 43% of the CIOs will adopt some form of cloud services with more than half of them spending on new infrastructure technologies to achieve increased efficiency and greater business impact. Although this data clearly implies that Cloud IaaS is the immediate future of outsourced hosting, Gartner advises users to exercise caution in this rapidly evolving market, since it is difficult to predict which vendors will be good long-term bets.
The magic quadrant focuses on three common usecases for cloud outsourced hosting:
- Self-managed IaaS. These customers seek self-provisioned, self-managed, cost-effective infrastructure as an alternative to buying their own equipment and placing it into colocation or into their own data center. This may serve basic needs such as test and development environments, but may also serve highly complex applications that customers want to self-manage. Cloud IaaS provides cost savings, capacity flexibility, rapid provisioning, simplified configuration and management, and ease of automation.
- Lightly managed IaaS. These customers seek all the capabilities of self-managed IaaS, but do not want to be entirely responsible for operations. Usually, they want management through the operating system level, including OS patch management, and often want managed security services as well. While many of these management functions are likely to be offered as automated services in the future, at present, they generally require some human intervention by the service provider. Lightly managed IaaS is overwhelmingly the most common scenario that Gartner's clients are trying to source.
- Complex managed hosting. These customers have traditional Web hosting needs. Customers of this type occupy a spectrum of complexity, scale and rate of change. Mainstream customers have: corporate websites and interactive marketing; dynamic applications such as intranet portals, collaboration, supply chain management and e-channel customer relationship management (e-CRM); modest-scale e-commerce; and hosting for small software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors. High-end customers typically have rich Internet applications with a high degree of complexity and rate of change, plus the need for highly scalable, flexible capacity; these customers usually have highly dynamic sites, such as complex e-commerce, SaaS applications, online gaming and "Web 2.0" businesses.
From a regional perspective, US Cloud IaaS providers led the way with the range of cloud services they provide. The magic quadrant summarizes the results of the study:
Gartner will be releasing a mid-year version of this report which will be focused only on the self-provisioned virtual data center segment of cloud service providers.