Microsoft has been warned that “Google and Oracle… will likely match and even exceed Azure’s capabilities on some dimensions in time” in Gartner’s 2022 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services.”
AWS, meanwhile, “AWS often optimizes for the short term when dealing with customers.. This, along with executive management changes, changing customer priorities, provider preferences in various regions and well-heeled competition, paint a challenging picture for AWS ahead” Gartner warned the leading hyperscaler.
The updated report singles out Oracle as having improved its OCI cloud offering (it is now recognised as a “visionary” in the 2022 Gartner cloud report rather than a “niche player”) saying that Oracle is “out-innovating the market with respect to emerging enterprise needs such as sovereign cloud” and “building compelling multicloud offerings leveraging its heritage in mission-critical database and data warehousing technology”.
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Yet Oracle’s brand remains toxic, it suggests, saying: “Oracle has negative brand association for many organizations… caused by years of tough compliance enforcement and inconsistent sales and support.
“Most of OCI’s success stems from top-down directives rather than bottom-up eagerness to use Oracle’s platform. Private labeling OCI may just delay the inevitable, unsavory discovery by the prospective customer that Oracle is inside” Gartner’s researchers add caustically – words unlikely to be well received by the company.
Noting that a similar CIO and executive-focussed sales approach by Google Cloud has also paid off, Gartner added: “GCP’s consistent enterprise focus and shift to selling to business executives (rather than to technical teams) is having very noticeable results, in terms of both adoption and enterprise mind share”. (A major partner of Gartner’s is Deutsche Bank – the two are co-innovating on a major digital transformation.)
The report comes as Gartner says that global spending on public cloud is set to hit $591.8 billion in 2023.
That project of a 20.7% rise comes despite customers having slowed their spending with the hyperscalers, according to recent earnings reports – which saw AWS’s growth slow from 37% to the mid-20% range.
