Gartner names Microsoft Azure a leader in the Magic Quadrant for cloud IaaS

Gartner has named Microsoft Azure as a leader in its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service for the third year in a row based on completeness of the company's vision and ability to execute.

"We are honoured by this continued recognition as we are relentless about our commitment and rapid pace of innovation for infrastructure services," said Nicole Herskowitz, Director of Product Marketing, Cloud Platform in a blog post. "Microsoft is the only vendor recognised as a leader across Gartner’s Magic Quadrants for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions for enterprise cloud workloads."

According to Herskowitz Azure customers tend to start with IaaS and then quickly extend to using both IaaS and PaaS models to optimise productivity and embrace new opportunities for business differentiation. "Today 55% of Azure IaaS customers are also deploying PaaS," she said. 

"We are in a unique position with our extensive portfolio of cloud offerings designed for the needs of enterprises, including SaaS offerings like Office 365, CRM Online and Power BI and Azure IaaS and PaaS. And Microsoft’s cloud vision is a unified story that we’re executing on with the same data centre regions, compliance commitments, operational model, billing, support and more. The ability to deploy and use applications close to data with consistent identity and a shared ecosystem, means greater efficiency, less complexity, and cost savings,"  she added.

Milestones for Azure including introducing the largest virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud as far back as January 2015 and recent support for SAP HANA workloads of up to 32 TB. Herskowitz also observed that nearly one in three VMs deployed on Azure are Linux. "Strong momentum for Linux and open source is driven by customers using Azure for business applications and modern application architectures, including containers and big data solutions. With over 60% of the 3,800 solutions in Azure Marketplace built on Linux, including popular open source images by Ubuntu, CoreOS, Bitnami, Oracle, DataStax, Red Hat and others, it’s exciting that many open source vendors considered Microsoft one of the best cloud partners," she said. 

The true power of Azure is enabling our customers and partners on their cloud journey to realize their unique business goals. Customers and partners like Fruit of the Loom and Boomerang demonstrate this common need and cloud adoption path from Software as a Service (SaaS) to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to Platform as a Service (PaaS).

A wide variety of businesses take advantage of Azure. Boomerang, an Office 365 ISV, takes advantage of Azure to create productivity solutions within Outlook. A key feature for Boomerang is its ability to generate real-time calendar images that are shareable with people outside of the user’s organisation. Boomerang relies on Azure’s enterprise-proven infrastructure to support this computationally demanding workload. Their experience with Office 365 led them to look more closely at Azure, and they have started to migrate services from AWS to Azure to leverage Azure’s platform services and machine learning capabilities.

Interested?

Read Gartner: Magic Quadrant for Infrastructure as a Service