Amazon Web Services
Strengths:
-
Enterprises make larger annual financial commitments and deploy more mission-critical workloads on AWS than with any other hyperscale provider. This speaks to how enterprises perceive AWS as a strategic provider of cloud infrastructure and platform services relative to other providers in the market.
-
AWS has a broader range of customer profiles, ranging from startups and small and midsize businesses (SMBs) to large enterprises, than any other provider in this market. Enterprises using AWS benefit from the early adopters, which help to push new technologies into the mainstream, derisking such services and making them easier to consume and manage as a result.
-
AWS is the most mature, enterprise-ready provider, with the strongest track record of customer success and the most useful partner ecosystem. Thus, it is the provider chosen by not only customers that value innovation and that are implementing digital business projects, but also preferred by customers that are migrating traditional data centers to cloud IaaS.
Cautions:
-
AWS makes frequent proclamations about the number of price reductions it has made. Customers interpret these proclamations as being applicable to the company’s services broadly, but this is not the case. For instance, the default and most frequently provisioned storage for AWS’s compute service has not experienced a price reduction since 2014, despite falling prices in the market for the raw components.
-
AWS prioritizes being first to market with respect to delivering new services and capabilities. As a result, it is willing to launch feature-poor services or services without deep cross-platform integration, which it often defers to the future to address. The quest to be first to market sometimes results in services that need years of substantial engineering updates.
-
As the ambitions of Amazon’s CEO expand into additional markets, the boards of directors for companies in potentially threatened verticals have directed their IT organizations to avoid the use of AWS where possible. This may ultimately limit AWS’s success in some verticals, and may impact the associated ecosystem. IT leaders in these verticals should consider a contingency plan for board-level directives.
Source: https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-1CMAPXNO&ct=190709&st=sb