back to article Cloud storage is a three-way race with no contenders

The cloud storage market is a three-way race with the trailing pack choosing to occupy niches rather than challenge the leaders, according to the market scryers of Gartner. The firm last week issued a new “Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Storage Services, Worldwide” that listed just seven providers: AWS, Google, Microsoft, IBM …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Doing wrong

    “lack of physical control of, and access to, a storage infrastructure” collectively

    Doesn't that describe a colo rather than public cloud?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Doing wrong

      By revenue though it's a two horse race between Microsoft and Amazon - with Microsoft some distance out in front. Google are not even on the long range RADAR...

  2. A Non e-mouse Silver badge
    Holmes

    Competition

    So Gartner are complaining that the new entrants are not competing with Amazon, Google & MS.

    Could this, perhaps, have something to do with the capital cost involved in trying to compete with them? Either you need *very* deep pockets and be prepared to take a very big gamble to compete with these three, or you find your own place in the market.

    Also remember that the big three aren't exactly falling over themselves to publish the financials from their cloud services. That could be (but isn't guaranteed) an indication that profits are wafer thin.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Competition

      "Wafer thin" is one way of putting it. As Bezos once said, "Your margin is my opportunity", so I think it's a pretty reasonably inference that S3 and Glacier are on razor-thin margins.

      Increasingly, it's likely that raw storage is going to be a loss leader to attract compute and other spending.

      1. PushF12
        Meh

        Re: Competition

        Today $60/year buys a terabyte of consumer storage from the big vendors, plus Amazon and Microsoft are already offering 'unlimited' subscriptions in some markets. Consumers will expect new competition to enter at this price point.

        The smaller players are still alive, but an oligopoly is discernible. Computing businesses are now more about capitalization and less about technology.

        The consolidation will be good for buyers in the coming decade, but very bad for all other commercial stakeholders.

  3. The Third Platform
    Paris Hilton

    No HP?

    Interesting to see HP or Century link don't feature.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: No HP?

      According to the Gartner report "HP was removed from this research because it no longer sells its public cloud storage services"

  4. asdf

    wow

    The definition of a slow news day (at least in IT) is the headline being about cloud storage. Did Gartner pay to play like their customers, I mean companies they rave about, do?

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