There were a few surprises in Gartner’s new public cloud “Magic Quadrant” report, which named Verizon and AT&T as “leaders” – but Amazon as “visionary” but “unproven,” namely because of its lack of managed services and standard options for colocation and dedicated non-virtualized servers.
In its December 2010 report, “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting,” – which Verizon touted in a press release today – 20 global providers of infrastructure-as-a-service and Web-hosting solutions were evaluated, with Verizon getting the kudos for its “completeness of vision and ability to execute” as well as a focus on the enterprise, as opposed to focusing on developers (such as Amazon).
For all cloud providers, Gartner recommended going beyond just the hosting of physical servers and management of data centers as infrastructure toward more robust service-level guarantees—an area where most cloud watchers agree there is room for significant improvement.
Most providers offer SLAs that either exclude downtime (or maintenance) and are written in such a way that vendors aren’t really ever held accountable.
As I wrote earlier this week, service providers in communications have an opportunity to further differentiate if they move beyond status-quo cloud services with “no SLA” or “low SLA,” and on to SLA-guaranteed services via a fully virtualized infrastructure to their enterprise customers. Again, they already have the expertise other cloud providers lack with managed services (i.e., monitoring performance, degradations and failures in services and networks).