Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure

Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

Key features and pros and cons of top Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure products:

Amazon Web Services - Leader

Pros:

Established public cloud provider: AWS DHI solutions are appealing to the broad range of existing AWS public cloud customers looking to extend their service to the data center and the edge.
Delivery model: The AWS Outposts fully managed delivery model matches strongly to customer demands for simplicity and a hands-off approach to infrastructure management.
Portfolio of services: AWS has been steadily increasing investment in its DHI product portfolio to create solutions and capabilities for financial services, public sector and telco customers.

Cons:

Multicloud: AWS DHI solutions will not be able to serve customers that require multicloud integration for infrastructure services.
Disconnected operations: AWS Outposts products are not designed for disconnected operation, which will not appeal to customers with limited cloud connectivity.
Product navigation: Some Gartner clients cite difficulties navigating through the available AWS DHI solutions and services. This is because different AWS DHI solutions serve different subsets of AWS APIs, instance types and procurement options.

Microsoft - Leader

Pros:

Track record: Microsoft is an established provider offering both public cloud services and on-premises data center solutions, with a demonstrated track record and good understanding of the needs of the DHI market.
Ecosystem support: Microsoft DHI customers tap into a robust global ecosystem that encompasses direct sales partners, OEMs and the pervasive presence of Azure Cloud. This dynamic setup yields significant advantages to meet diverse requirements effectively.
Unified hybrid control plane: Azure Arc-enabled services are designed to extend Azure controls and processes to other public cloud, private cloud and edge deployments.

Cons:

Operations: Some Gartner clients are reporting difficulty managing the entire solution seamlessly as it may require multiple administration tools spanning multiple generations of Microsoft solutions.
Scalability: An individual cluster of Azure Stack HCI cannot exceed 16 host nodes, limiting its applicability for large data center modernization scenarios.
Offering complexity: Some Gartner clients cite the complexity of rightsizing, building and integrating hybrid solutions from different software, hardware and management components. Others cite confusion resulting from the multiple products in the Azure Stack portfolio.

Oracle - Leader

Pros:

Operational consistency: Oracle Dedicated Region provides a complete Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) at the customer site with feature parity with a public OCI region. This contrasts with its peers that typically offer a limited set of services at a customer site.
Delivery model: OCI DHI has a variety of delivery models to meet customer use cases. They range from a fully managed delivery solution that appeals to clients who simply want to use services and not deal with infrastructure management to a fully air-gapped customer-managed solution for high-security or sovereign clouds.
Pricing: Many OCI services such as egress costs and compute instances are priced lower than the equivalents from other hyperscale vendors, and on-premises pricing is the same as in the cloud.

Cons:

Customer sentiment: Oracle is often cited for its high-pressure sales tactics and likelihood of audit postpurchase. As a result, many enterprises resist expanding their use of Oracle technologies.
Support for midsize enterprises: Oracle's DHI solution is focused on large enterprise customers. The significant investment in on-premises hardware and data center space and power limits the uptake of the solution in smaller enterprises.
Edge solution: OCI's edge solution, Roving Edge, is primarily designed around the ruggedized device edge. OCI does not have a more optimal DHI solution for the remote office/branch office.

VMware - Leader

Pros:

Installed base: VMware is a leader in software-defined infrastructure and has a significant installed base globally. VMware users will find a path to leverage their skills to transition to DHI for virtualization and containers.
Multicloud vision: Among the offerings in this Magic Quadrant, VMware Cloud Foundation has the widest range of availability from hyperscale cloud providers including AWS, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle in addition to hundreds of cloud service providers globally. This positions VCF well for future multicloud requirements.
Cloud management strategy: VMware's Aria Suite of products provide automation and operations capabilities that span on-premises and public cloud DHI locations.

Cons:

Price perception: Based on Gartner client interactions, VMware offerings are often perceived as some of the more costly options in the market.
Multicloud implementation: VMware cloud partners provide the VCF offering with varying degrees of self-management. This introduces complexity and potential inconsistency in multicloud VMware DHI customer experience.
Pending acquisition: Gartner clients have expressed concerns about the potential impacts to pricing and support based on Broadcom's pending acquisition of VMware. Broadcom announced its intention to acquire VMware on 26 May 2022. At the time of this evaluation, however, Broadcom and VMware operate as separate entities. Gartner will provide further insight as more details become available.

Nutanix - Challenger

Pros:

Market position: Nutanix is a market leader in hyperconverged infrastructure software. Numerous customers use HCI software as a stepping stone to hybrid cloud.
Simplicity: Nutanix customers often cite the offering's ease of use, including the ability to manage multiple hypervisors, which can streamline management and migration.
Licensing: A Nutanix Cloud Platform license is portable across multiple server hardware solutions as well as AWS and Azure cloud providers. This makes it simpler for customers to implement hybrid cloud.

Cons:

Single pathway: For customers with a "cloud first" approach that do not wish to take an HCI path to enable hybrid cloud, Nutanix will be an unlikely choice.
Financial maturity: Nutanix has demonstrated positive cash flow and not generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) profitability. Still, some Gartner clients have expressed concerns over the fact that Nutanix has yet to reach consistent profitability by GAAP standards.
Consumption models: For customers seeking as-a-service consumption-based models, Nutanix itself does not provide this option consistently across its entire product portfolio. This can create a complex consumption-based purchase structure when choosing numerous Nutanix products as a solution.

IBM - Visionary

Pros:

Distributed cloud-native infrastructure: IBM delivers a consistent platform across its own and other public clouds using OpenShift and IBM Cloud Satellite, enabling modernized applications to be in a hybrid multicloud environment.
Business-critical applications: IBM is uniquely positioned to aid customers with the integration of business-critical applications across platforms, including IBM Z and IBM Power and x86, into a modernized hybrid solution using OpenShift, Cloud Satellite and IBM Power Private Cloud.
Market focus: IBM has targeted cloud offerings for regulated industries, such as financial services and retail, with capabilities to support industry-specific requirements.

Cons:

Product navigation: While IBM's individual products have strong capabilities, its overall DHI offering is complex and hard to navigate, and requires self-assembly by the end user.
Virtual machine support: IBM's DHI solution utilizes KubeVirt as part of Red Hat OpenShift to manage virtual machines on x86 systems. KubeVirt is relatively new and is yet to be demonstrated as ready for large-scale enterprise implementations.
Inconsistent offerings: While IBM has a number of offerings available "as a service," it does not have a consistent program that covers all of the products encompassed in its DHI offering. This leads to complex management of SLAs and different charging mechanisms for different products.

Alibaba Cloud - Niche Player

Pros:

Vision: Alibaba's international marketing of its Apsara Stack and distributed offerings such as CloudBox and Edge Node Service (ENS) have been limited. However, its overall vision for hybrid and distributed cloud computing is comprehensive and comprises a full range of edge, private cloud, dedicated cloud and public cloud solutions.
Public cloud infrastructure: Alibaba's combined infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) portfolio is the most comprehensive of the Chinese cloud providers, and its global partner network is larger. A majority of the most popular Alibaba Cloud services are available in both its public cloud and Apsara private cloud environments.
International data center footprint: Alibaba maintains 15 public cloud regions outside of China across all geographies except Latin America and Africa. Only four regions outside of China are single AZ.

Cons:

Global DHI deployments: Apsara Stack has had some success outside of China, notably in Southeast Asia and India. However, although Alibaba claims it is available for purchase in North America and Europe, Gartner has observed very few DHI production customer deployments in these regions.
Customer support in Europe and North America: While Alibaba maintains two regions each in the U.S. and in Europe, its local sales and service presence is very limited. Live technical support internationally is provided in English and Mandarin only.
International customer experience: International customers report lower satisfaction with their overall Alibaba Cloud experience than for other vendors in this Magic Quadrant.

Huawei - Niche Player

Pros:

Market share in China: Huawei has a strong position in the IaaS market in Greater China (second-largest revenue in 2022). Organizations can look to Huawei as a strong choice to meet requirements in this region.
Telecommunications expertise: Huawei has a strong history of serving the needs of the telecommunications sector worldwide.
Portfolio: Huawei continues to develop innovative capabilities in adjacent markets (including public cloud and 5G). Organizations looking for a network-centric DHI solution will find Huawei a contender to meet such requirements.

Cons:

International availability: Not all products and services are available outside China. This will require organizations to confirm availability of required functionality in all locations where it would be deployed.
Geopolitical concerns: The U.S. sanctions have continued to impact Huawei's supply chain, product planning and market expansion strategy outside China. This has raised concern among risk-averse organizations operating outside China.
Ecosystem: Although it has an established partner network, Huawei has limited traction for its DHI solutions with partners outside China. This limits its appeal for partners in international markets and its applicability to multinational organizations.

Tencent Cloud - Niche Player

Pros:

Roadmap: Tencent has a committed international DHI roadmap. Its Tencent Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) is integrated with Tencent Edge Zones, and it offers private cloud environments with customer-dedicated clusters as well as local public cloud capacity with cloud-dedicated zones.
Business model: Tencent aims to be a strong option for international companies looking to enter the Chinese market. It is also a logical choice for existing Tencent customers in China looking to expand internationally.
Open-source technologies: Tencent shows commitment to industry-leading open-source technologies that can run on a variety of third-party hardware. Customers familiar with Kubernetes may find their learning curve with Tencent Cloud services to be shorter than with other more proprietary PaaS alternatives.

Cons:

Service portfolio: Some key distributed cloud products that Tencent sells in China, such as Tencent Edge Zones, are not available internationally, and Tencent has not committed to future General Availability (GA) dates. Tencent currently has very few customers that have deployed both public and private cloud solutions outside of China.
Marketing strategy: Tencent has repeatedly rebranded and repositioned its distributed hybrid and edge solutions over the past few years. This reflects a potential lack of clarity within the company about how to best cater to international audiences and effectively compete in the global market.
Industry solutions: Tencent's industry-specific focus is immature outside of China. Its historical strengths in gaming and social networking are evident in its PaaS services, but not in any DHI solutions tailored for these markets.

FAQs

Q: Which vendors are Leaders in 2023?

A: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Oracle, VMware

Q: What does "Leader" mean in MQ terms?

A: Leaders distinguish themselves by offering a service suitable for strategic adoption and having an ambitious roadmap. They can serve a broad range of use cases. However, they do not excel in all areas, may not necessarily be the best providers for a specific need and may not serve some use cases at all. Leaders in this market have appreciable market share and many referenceable customers supporting multiple geographies, verticals and deployment models.

Q: How do I interpret a Gartner Magic Quadrant?

A: https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/magic-quadrants-research

Report:

Top Vendor Products for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure in 2023

Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

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FAQs

Q: Which vendors are Leaders in 2023?

Q: What does "Leader" mean in MQ terms?

Q: How do I interpret a Gartner Magic Quadrant?

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