by Lydia Leong | November 16, 2011 | Comments Off
One year ago, when we did our 2010 hosting/cloud Magic Quadrant, you were doing pretty well as a service provider if you had a bare-minimum cloud IaaS offering — a service in which customers could go in, push buttons and self-service provision and de-provision virtual machines. There were providers with more capabilities than that, but [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: Cloud, hosting, IaaS
by Lydia Leong | November 14, 2011 | 1 Comment
We’re wrapping up our Public Cloud IaaS Magic Quadrant (the drafts will be going out for review today or tomorrow), and we’ve just formally initiated the Managed Hosting and Cloud IaaS Magic Quadrant. This new Magic Quadrant is the next update of last year’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting. [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: Cloud, Gartner, hosting, IaaS, MQ, research
by Lydia Leong | November 13, 2011 | Comments Off
I’d meant to blog about Yottaa when it launched back in October, because it’s one of the most interesting entrants to the CDN market that I’ve seen in a while. Yottaa is a fourth-generation CDN that offers site analytics, edge caching, a little bit of network optimization, and front-end optimization. While CDNs of earlier generations [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: Akamai, CDN
by Lydia Leong | November 11, 2011 | 1 Comment
I’ve been trialing cloud IaaS providers lately, and the frustration of getting through many of the sign-up processes has reminded me of some recurring conversations that I’ve had with service providers over the past few years. Many cloud IaaS providers regard the fact that they don’t take online sign-ups as a point of pride — [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: Cloud, IaaS, security
by Lydia Leong | November 9, 2011 | Comments Off
We’re currently in the midst of agenda planning for 2012, which is a fancy way to say that we’re trying to figure out what we’re going to write next year. Probably to the despair of my managers, I am almost totally a spontaneous writer, who sits down on a plane and happens to write a [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: Cloud, customers, developers, hosting, IaaS, networking, research, VMware
by Lydia Leong | November 8, 2011 | 4 Comments
I’ve just finished writing the forthcoming Public Cloud IaaS Magic Quadrant (except for some anticipated tweaks when particular providers come back with answers to some questions), which has twenty providers. Although Gartner normally doesn’t do hands-on evaluations, this MQ was an exception, because the easiest way to find out if a given service can do [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: Cloud, hands-on, IaaS, research
by Lydia Leong | November 8, 2011 | 1 Comment
I promised the attendees at my Gartner Symposium workshop, called “Using Amazon Web Services“, that I would post the notes from the session, so here they are — with some context for public consumption. A workshop is a structured, facilitated discussions that are designed to assist participants in working through a problem, coming up with [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: Amazon, Cloud, conference, Gartner, GartnerSym
by Lydia Leong | August 23, 2011 | Comments Off
There’s one thing in particular that tends to make Akamai customers “sticky” — the amount the customer uses professional services. The more professional services a customer consumes from Akamai, the less likely it is they’ll ever switch CDNs. In short: The more of a pain it’s been for them to integrate with Akamai’s CDN (usually [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: AKAM, CDN
by Lydia Leong | August 8, 2011 | Comments Off
(This is part of a series of “catch-up” posts of announcements that I’ve wanted to comment on but didn’t previously find time to blog about.) Riverbed made two interesting acquisitions recently, which I think signal a clear intention to be more than just a traditional WAN optimization controller (WOC) vendor — Zeus, and Aptimize. If [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: Cloud, network, news
by Lydia Leong | August 7, 2011 | Comments Off
Amazon has introduced a new connectivity option called AWS Direct Connect. In plain speak, Direct Connect allows an Amazon customer to get a cross-connect between his own network equipment and Amazon’s, in some location where the two companies are physically colocated. In even plainer speak, if you’re an Equinix colocation customer in their Ashburn, Virginia [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: Amazon, Cloud, colocation, EQIX
