The staying power of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud remains unchanged in Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant report for cloud infrastructure and platform services (CIPS).

The trio of hyperscale giants are ranked, as expected, in line with their respective shares of the market. 

Gartner analysts laud AWS for its broad support of IT services, running from cloud native and edge to mission-critical workloads, and its “engineering prowess” in designing CPUs and silicon. This focus on owning increasingly larger portions of the supply chain for cloud infrastructure bolsters the No. 1 cloud provider’s long-term outlook and earns it advantages against competitors, according to the report.

“AWS often sets the pace in the market for innovation, which guides the roadmaps of other CIPS providers. As the innovation leader, AWS has materially more mind share across a broad range of personas and customer types than all other providers,” the analysts wrote. 

AWS, which recently hit a $59 billion annual run rate, contributed 13% of Amazon’s total revenue and almost 54% of its profit during second-quarter 2021. 

Gartner did, however, note that dozens of its clients across many regions reported “unexpected pressure from AWS sales, which has sharply accelerated over the past year, to increase annual spend commitments by 20% to renew existing contracts.” 

The analysts also concluded the company’s leadership position in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) “creates a misleading halo effect for other offerings, such as AWS Outposts, which has experienced modest traction to date.”

Microsoft Azure, which remains locked in at a 51% annual growth rate, earned praise from Gartner for its strength “in all use cases, which include the extended cloud and edge computing,” particularly among Microsoft-centric organizations.

The No. 2 public cloud provider also enjoys broad appeal. “Microsoft has the broadest set of capabilities, covering a full range of enterprise IT needs from SaaS to PaaS and IaaS, compared to any provider in this market,” the analysts wrote. 

“Strategic alignment with Microsoft gives Azure advantages across nearly every vertical market,” Gartner said. The firm did, however, knock Microsoft for “very complex licensing and contracting” and “uneven cloud skills in the field,” adding that sales pressure to grow overall account revenue prevents Azure from reducing customers’ total Microsoft costs.

Google Cloud was praised for its strength in “nearly all use cases,” but also criticized for “slowly improving its edge capabilities.” 

The company is making gains in mindshare among enterprises and “lands at the top of survey results when infrastructure leaders are asked about strategic cloud provider selection in the next few years,” Gartner analysts wrote. Google is also closing “meaningful gaps with AWS and Microsoft Azure in CIPS capabilities,” and outpacing its larger competitors in some cases, according to the report.

The analysts also noted that Google Cloud “is the only CIPS provider with significant market share that currently operates at a financial loss.” The No. 3 public cloud provider reported a 54% year-over-year revenue increase and a 59% decrease in operating losses during Q2.

Beyond the top three players, Gartner placed Alibaba Cloud in the “visionaries” box, and ranked Oracle, Tencent Cloud, and IBM as “niche players” in that order. 

Alibaba Cloud earned marks for its continued leadership position in China and surrounding countries, but Garnter noted “the company has yet to have breakout success in markets outside of its home region and is unlikely to meaningfully penetrate such markets.”

Oracle, while starting from a smaller base, “has added more capabilities on a percentage basis over the past year than any other provider in the market,” the analysts wrote. That pace of innovation in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, while impressive, also means that “many of its capabilities are new and immature,” and cloud-native capabilities are less likely to have been adopted widely as a result, according to Gartner. 

Tencent Cloud earned praise for its strength in social media, digital marketing, gaming, and its growing presence with top financial institutions in China. “One-third of Tencent’s regions outside of mainland China are operated by a partner. Additionally, two-thirds of Tencent’s total regions have only one availability zone,” the analysts wrote. 

Gartner described IBM Cloud as “mostly focused on lift-and-shift and extended enterprise use cases,” largely among large and midsized enterprises. The company’s managed infrastructure business spinoff “may enable IBM to commit resources to IBM Cloud engineering efforts to further advance the offerings,” but it “continues to trail the market in terms of both market share and capabilities,” the analysts wrote.

While all of the providers in the Magic Quadrant report have similar pricing models, virtual machines, managed container services, and managed database PaaS offerings, “what’s wholly different is below the surface,” Gartner wrote. 

“The market for cloud infrastructure and platform services is consolidating, with over 90% of the worldwide market concentrated in just four cloud providers. … This consolidation shows no sign of slowing down,” the analysts wrote. 

“The worldwide consolidation is occurring largely as a result of enterprises seeking industrialized offerings that bring with them a level of dependability and a wide breadth of functionality to satisfy all enterprise workloads,” Gartner concluded.