Google Gains New Ground in Gartner Magic Report

Recently, Gartner showed that it's taking Google's quest to be the best seriously in their most recent Magic quadrant Report for IaaS in 2019. Gartner's magic quadrant reports are highly well-respected analyses of the marketplace. Every year, countless reports are released, covering everything from the leading collaboration companies, to the top providers of software as a service. The Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant report examines "infrastructure as a service" vendors like Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and more. 

Although this years IaaS report looks very similar to the one that arrived in 2018, there have been some significant changes. For instance, Google Cloud seems to be moving up the rankings to become more of a tier 1 provider, thanks to new investments in analytics capabilities, strategic acquisitions, and service solutions. On the other hand, competitors like Microsoft have been struggling with issues regarding reliability. You can see the full IaaS report here.

Marking Google as a Leader in IaaS

The Gartner 2019 Magic Quadrant for IaaS has established Google Cloud as a "leader" in the current marketplace. Currently, Google is placed third out of 6 IaaS vendors in total. Although Google Cloud already made the cut into the leadership segment in 2018, Gartner has said that it's position has officially improved since then. According to the Gartner team, Google is doing better than ever thanks to the ability to execute that company has shown lately. 

Although Amazon Web Services remains at the number one spot on Gartner's list for now, with Microsoft Corporation's Azure cloud bringing up the rear, Google is catching up. Gartner even criticized Microsoft this year for having reliability issues from an IaaS perspective in recent months. The latest Magic Quadrant also demonstrates that there's a huge gap between the top three and the other challengers in the market, like the IBM group, Oracle, and Alibaba. All of these players have been placed into the much lower category of "niche". 

In regard to Google's growth and development Gartner said that the stature of the business has grown significantly, thanks to a growing expertise in data analytics, stronger machine learning services, and a range of well-timed investments. Gartner defined Google as a "strategic" vendor. In a blog post about the latest report, Google Cloud President Rob Enslin said that while running the right cloud applications is important, companies need to be able to make sense of the data that they're collecting too. That's where Google is getting ahead of the game this year.

Carving a Path to the Top

Google's new position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't have challenges to overcome. The business still needs to work on it's strategies when it comes to earning enterprise accounts, and sales coverage remains a bit thin according to Gartner. At the same time, Amazon is a difficult giant to beat, thanks to its enterprise-ready approach. 

However, much to the delight of the team at Google, Gartner also noted that Amazon isn't perfect either. It rarely offers the best prices, and the storage service it provides hasn't been updated for a number of years now. Similarly, Gartner also mentioned that Microsoft Azure's service has been hit by various outages in recent months, although Microsoft has promised that it will try to rectify those problems going forward by investing in more availability zones. 

Google may only be third in the cloud market for now, but it's moving in the right direction - onwards and upwards. The Google cloud team is continuing to build out the enterprise chops of the offering, focusing on new ways to delight the industry and its customers. While there's still work for Google to do in the months and years ahead, Gartner's latest report is sign that Kurian and the team are making the necessary steps to put them at the top of the ladder for cloud computing and IaaS one day.