Posted on August 4, 2016

Nicole Herskowitz Director of Product Marketing, Cloud Platform

CIOs no longer ask whether they should use cloud, but rather how. According to IDC, seventy percent of CIOs will embrace a cloud-first strategy in 2016. By partnering closely with customers around the world, we see the natural path to enterprise cloud adoption -- starting with software services like email and collaboration, then moving to infrastructure for storage, compute and networking and finally embracing platform services to transform business agility and customer engagements. In this journey to adopt the cloud, customers are looking for a vendor who understands and leads in meeting the broad spectrum of their cloud needs.

Today, Gartner has named Microsoft a leader in its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service for the third year in a row based on completeness of our vision and ability to execute. We are honored by this continued recognition as we are relentless about our commitment and rapid pace of innovation for infrastructure services. With the G series, Azure led with the largest VMs in the cloud and we continue to deliver market leading performance with our recent announcement supporting SAP HANA workloads up to 32 TB. And while Azure is a world class cloud platform for Windows, it’s also recognized for industry-leading support for Linux and other open source technologies. Today, nearly one in three VMs deployed on Azure are Linux. Strong momentum for Linux and open source is driven by customers using Azure for business applications and modern application architectures, including containers and big data solutions. With over sixty percent of the 3,800 solutions in Azure Marketplace built on Linux, including popular open source images by Ubuntu, CoreOS, Bitnami, Oracle, DataStax, Red Hat and others, it’s exciting that many open source vendors considered Microsoft one of the best cloud partners.

While we are proud of our continued leadership in cloud infrastructure, we are committed to delivering the breadth and depth of cloud solutions to support our customers’ natural path to cloud adoption. Microsoft is the only vendor recognized as a leader across Gartner’s Magic Quadrants for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions for enterprise cloud workloads. We are in a unique position with our extensive portfolio of cloud offerings designed for the needs of enterprises, including Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings like Office 365, CRM Online and Power BI and Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). And Microsoft’s cloud vision is a unified story that we’re executing on with the same datacenter regions, compliance commitments, operational model, billing, support and more. The ability to deploy and use applications close to data with consistent identity and a shared ecosystem, means greater efficiency, less complexity, and cost savings.

Many of our customers embrace Identity as a first step in moving to the cloud. Office 365 and Azure share the same identity system with Azure Active Directory therefore providing a simple, friction free experience for our customers. And with Office 365 commercial customers surpassing 70 million monthly active users, Azure adoption is quickly following suit. Once in Azure, customers tend to start with IaaS and then quickly extend to using both IaaS and PaaS models to optimize productivity and embrace new opportunities for business differentiation. Today fifty-five percent of Azure IaaS customers are also deploying PaaS.

The following table summarizes vendors in the leader quadrant across Gartner MQs for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions for key enterprise cloud workloads.

The true power of Azure is enabling our customers and partners on their cloud journey to realize their unique business goals. Customers and partners like Fruit of the Loom and Boomerang demonstrate this common need and cloud adoption path from Software as a Service (SaaS) to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to Platform as a Service (PaaS).

• Fruit of the Loom: Office 365 was their “runway” to Azure. Success with Office 365 deployment has led to use of Azure infrastructure and its platform services as they moved their consumer-facing website fruit.com to Azure. To gain insight into how they should market and package their products, Fruit of the Loom is also leveraging platform services such as Azure Machine Learning.
• Boomerang: An Office 365 ISV takes advantage of Azure to create productivity solutions within Outlook. A key feature for Boomerang is its ability to generate real-time calendar images that are shareable with people outside of the user’s organization. Boomerang relies on Azure’s enterprise-proven infrastructure to support this computationally demanding workload. Their experience with Office 365 led them to look more closely at Azure, and they have started to migrate services from AWS to Azure to leverage Azure’s platform services and Machine Learning capabilities.

We look forward to delivering more on this vision across our portfolio of cloud offerings to our customers and partners. If you’d like to read the full report, “Gartner: Magic Quadrant for Infrastructure as a Service,” you can request it here.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.