For the past 6 months or so I have been learning alot about the cloud offering in general and for ISV specifically. For all of this time I was waiting for some analystis offical reports, finally last month The Gartner Magic Quadrant for cloud infrastructure-as-a-service and Web hosting was published.
Gratner says: “Amazon has the weakest cloud compute SLA of any of the evaluated competing public cloud compute services, even though its uptime is actually very good” this is true though my opnion is that this Amazon “weakness” just proves its strength in the market as one of the main ways for other providers like Rackspace to compete with AWS is by presenting a “better uptime” as they can’t really beat Amazon infrustructure robustness and capabilities.
They also say that “Amazon is the only evaluated vendor that does not also offer the standard options of colocation, dedicated nonvirtualized servers … These components are critical for many customers, who need hybrid, not pure cloud, environments.” I can say the Gartner totally got it wrong with their definition of the IaaS as for my opinion, Amazon is a pure cloud infrustructure that should not support specific needs and dedicated enviornments. This fact doesn’t say that a major ISVs with enterprise solutions will not be able to implement on the cloud, the other way around, if the ISV will be aligned with Amazon vision I think that eventually it will be aligned with the IT future.
Gartner’s analysis concept and forecasts need to be considered of course when an ISV do plans on the cloud though as the cloud industry is a new area additional research should be performed and debates should be raised.
More resources about this subject:
Click here to read the article brought you by gigaom.com discussing and debating Gartner’s report.
“We are not “dissing” Amazon.” – click here and read how Gartner’s research director, Lydia Leong relate to some press reports for that matter.
