Customers warn Gartner of AWS's high-pressure sales tactics in latest verdict on public cloud providers

Gartner has published its latest Magic Quadrant report on public cloud providers, reporting that customers are facing "unexpected pressure from AWS Sales" and that Microsoft still has reliability challenges. The Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services covers IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) as well as …

[elsergiovolador]

Public?

Interesting that they have included communist cloud services.

The western companies cannot exactly start a cloud business in China without sharing the pie with CPC and everything that comes with it.

Way to shoot yourself in the foot and lose all credibility.

[mmccul]

Re: Public?

Gartner has credibility still?

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Public?

Fair point.

[RM Myers]

Re: Public?

Gartner had credibility in the past?

[katrinab]

What's the difference between a "private cloud region on-premises product", and a computer in your own server room?

Is the i7-3770 that lives under my desk, and runs NextCloud and a few other things a "private cloud region on-premises product"?

[John Riddoch]

It's pretty much about using the same toolset for automating stuff on-prem in the same way as you do for in the cloud provider's DC. And paying the cloud provider for the privilege. You'll save a bit on on-prem licensing (like VMWare) which softens the pain a bit, I guess.

It's not completely pointless, but it's a niche for when you need stuff on-prem (e.g. for latency) but don't want to have to manage VMWare and the other bits of the stack.

[eldakka]

> It's not completely pointless, but it's a niche for when you need stuff on-prem (e.g. for latency) but don't want to have to manage VMWare and the other bits of the stack.

And for security if you don't want someone else having possession of your data.

If you were for example Wallmart and just starting an online purchasing system, would you really want to run it on AWS where AWS would have access to your data and might be using it to their advantage with their competing Amazon online retail services?

Or if you were building a competitor to Office 365, would you really want to run your product on Azure where Microsoft could have access to that data for competitive purposes?

[orly_andico]

If you were for example Wallmart and just starting an online purchasing system, would you really want to run it on AWS where AWS would have access to your data and might be using it to their advantage with their competing Amazon online retail services?

This is a complete red herring and FUD. No hyperscale provider would be able to pass ISO27K (or survive as a business) if they were accessing customer data.

Walmart uses Azure.

That said, all the hyperscalers state that they WILL turn over your data to law enforcement in the presence of a valid warrant. So you really should be encrypting your data anyway.

[sketharaman]

Cloud Providers Do Access Customer Data

Not FUD in terms of data access. But FUD in terms of anybody caring in USA. Oracle and Salesforce have publicly stated that they will use one customer's data to provide market intelligence to other customers. Although both companies are facing billion dollar lawsuits in EU over this GDPR violation, nobody seems to care about this in their core market in USA. Until the mid 2000s or so, leading US retailer TARGET had its online store on Amazon.com. AFAIK, Netflix still runs on AWS despite the obvious competition from Amazon Prime Video.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the difference between a "private cloud region on-premises product", and a computer in your own server room?

Oracle has two options:

+ A bit of the Oracle cloud in your datacentre, fully managed by Oracle but you know that all your data is in your DC.

+ A private cloud system in your DC with all the same features as the public cloud, but entirely managed by you, and also has all the data in your DC.

There also hybrid versions, where you can link to the Oracle cloud, for DR or extra capacity.

[Pascal Monett]

The difference is the license fee that they can extract from you.

[Anonymous Coward]

And they get you to pay the power & HVAC bills.

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

And, it being Oracle, I have no doubt that you have to pay a licensing fee to provide power and HVAC to your own servers.

[Ken Moorhouse]

Re: "private cloud region on-premises product" vs a pc in your own server room?

As someone who has been involved in data recovery, the question needs to be asked: If the on-premises cloud server breaks, can you take it apart, pull out the hard drive and copy the data, thus recovering it? Or will the agreement you have with the cloud company mean that you cannot do any of that, and have to wait for them to sort the problem out? This is the acid test as far as I am concerned.

I would imagine that the hard drive may be structured in a proprietary way such that data recovery is not possible. Ever pulled apart a NAS drive to recover the data? Who asks the question when buying a NAS drive that has non-accessible disks?

Similar problems occurred with Data Recovery on standard pc's in year's gone by where someone had used a product such as Disk Manager to prepare their drives, without understanding the consequences of this action should recovery be necessary. I made sure I laid my hands on as many DM diskettes as I could for my toolbox.

[mmccul]

Sales pressure

Gartner has a strong reputation for engaging in behavior that if you are feeling exceedingly polite and generous, would be called high pressure sales tactics on companies to be included in their listings as well as "improve" their ratings. For them to warn about another company engaging in high pressure tactics feels more than a little ironic.

[ronkee]

Re: Sales pressure

Or really alarming.

Gonna be harder to shug off cloud lock-in from now on.

Space programs ain't cheap.

[FozzyBear]

Gartner Magic Quadrant

Ironically, if I was to plot the relevance of a Gartner quad report in any IT professionals decision making process it would have to be in the bottom far left of the box.

[eldakka]

Re: Gartner Magic Quadrant

> Ironically, if I was to plot the relevance of a Gartner quad report in any IT professionals decision making process it would have to be in the bottom far left of the box.

Depends on how you define IT 'professional'. Techies? You are right, mostly irrelevant. CIOs and other CxOs, Enterprise Architects, they eat this stuff up.

[sketharaman]

Re: Gartner Magic Quadrant

Totally agree. I've been in the IT industry for 35+ years. If there's one constant during that period, it's that CxOs always eat out of Gartner's hands. It's not only in large enterprises but even in the government, as another article on El Reg would suggest: Leeds City Council swallows the Gartner glossary and orders up 'post-modern' ERP in £44m SAP replacement (https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/03/leeds_city_council_erp/).

And it's not just buyers.

Given a choice between landing a Fortune 500 company deal and being featured in the Leader Quadrant of Gartner MQ, I reckon a majority of IT company CEOs would choose the latter.

[Cliffwilliams44]

Re: Gartner Magic Quadrant

Yes, they eat it and its the IT staff that has to suffer the food poisoning.

[Anonymous Coward]

TaaS

It needs to include TaaS (TITSUP as a service).