Gartner

Gartner Group divulgou o resultado de uma pesquisa que formatou o “quadrante mágico” para o mercado de Unified Communications que envolve diretamente o conceito de Computação em Nuvem em empresas dos Estados Unidos. O gráfico conhecido por “quadrante mágico” visa consolidar uma pesquisa de mercado em um único gráfico, mostrando quem são os visionários, os líderes, os que atuam em nichos específicos e, dentre eles, quem tem habilidade de executar ou quem tem um roadmap mais sólido. As maiores empresas de infraestrutura que oferecem serviços de Cloud Computing, destacam-se pelo inovação e capacidade de execução. Isto denota um mercado maduro que é disputado pelas maiores empresas do mundo neste segmento. Abaixo, na íntegra a pesquisa realizada:

Magic Quadrant for Web Hosting and Hosted Cloud System Infrastructure Services (On Demand)

Lydia Leong, Ted Chamberlin
Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00168687

The Web hosting market is evolving rapidly and converging with cloud system infrastructure services, creating new opportunities for cost savings and business agility. These services are all unique, and vendors must be chosen with care.

Web hosting is rapidly converging with cloud system infrastructure services. For the last several years, the market has been evolving toward on-demand infrastructure provisioned on a flexible, pay-as-you-go basis, but the introduction of cloud computing offerings has radically accelerated innovation in this market. The economic downturn has accelerated adoption of these offerings, thanks to the cost-savings that can be achieved by the move from physical to virtual services, and from purchasing for peak capacity to obtaining what you need only when you need it. The majority of hosting customers now obtain at least some of their infrastructure on-demand, and most new hosting contracts include on-demand services. This evolution has quickly changed the vendor landscape, bringing many new entrants to rapid prominence, as well as decreasing the relevance of hosters who have failed to make this shift.

As a result of this market shift, we have changed our inclusion and evaluation criteria for the Magic Quadrant. We have based our 2009 evaluation on five use cases for hosting, all of which are made more cost-efficient by on-demand infrastructure. The use cases are:

• Self-managed hosting, for cost-effective agile replacement of a traditional data center.
• Mainstream managed hosting, for Web content and applications of low to moderate complexity.
• Highly complex managed hosting, for rich Internet applications.
• Global solutions portfolio, for a diversified set of interactive marketing needs.
• Enterprise applications hosting, for infrastructure underlying complex applications such as SAP.

Choose a provider based on its ability to provide a cost-effective architecture and high-quality customer experience for your envisioned use case.

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Web Hosting and Hosted Cloud System Infrastructure Services (On Demand), 2009

 

 

Market Overview

The Web hosting market is in the midst of business and technological transformation. Over the next five years, the cloud trait of elasticity will come to dominate this market. Although customers are, over the long term, still likely to sign multi-year commitments for managed services, the infrastructure itself will be obtained on-demand.

This is a time of both great opportunities and great risks for Web hosters. New entrants are altering the landscape, and established hosters that previously lagged the market have been able to make bold investments in an attempt to catch, or even overtake, more established competitors. Hosters must execute the change to the business and technology model without disruption to their existing customer base. Many established providers are investing aggressively in technology innovation and exploitation, and we expect that some will engage in mergers and acquisitions in order to decrease their time to market and obtain engineering expertise with new technologies.

No single vendor in this market does everything well. Moreover, while all vendors on this Magic Quadrant serve a global clientele, their data center footprints and locations vary significantly. As a result, it is important to match your use case with a vendor that excels in serving that particular type of need. Smaller providers may do one thing extraordinarily well, but not have a comprehensive set of services that lets them serve a broad array of use cases. More than ever before, it is crucial to look beyond the Magic Quadrant Leaders when selecting a vendor. The vendor that is perfect for your needs may be a Niche Player.

The Top Five Use Cases

Gartner has observed five main use cases for hosting among our client base. We have evaluated each provider on all five of these use cases, in order to produce a composite rating for each. The use cases are as follows:

• Self-managed hosting. This customer seeks self-provisioned, self-managed, cost-effective infrastructure, as an alternative to buying his own equipment and placing it into co-location or into his own data center. This may serve basic needs such as test and development environments, but may also serve highly complex applications that the customer wants to self-manage. On-demand hosting provides cost savings, capacity flexibility, rapid provisioning, simplified configuration and management, and ease of automation.

• Mainstream managed hosting. This customer has Web content and applications with low to moderate complexity, scale and rate of change. This may include sites of a primarily informational nature, such as corporate websites and interactive marketing, as well as dynamic applications such as intranet portals, collaboration, supply chain management and eCRM. It may also include modest-scale e-commerce and hosting for small software as a service (SaaS) vendors. On-demand hosting provides cost savings through virtualization and reduction of over-provisioning.

• Highly complex managed hosting. This customer has a rich Internet application with a high degree of complexity and rate of change, plus the need for highly scalable, flexible capacity. This includes highly dynamic sites such as complex e-commerce, SaaS applications, online gaming and “Web 2.0″ businesses. On-demand hosting provides cost savings through reduction of over-provisioning, and handles the need for business agility via near-instant scalability.

• Global solutions portfolio. This customer is a global company that needs a complete set of solutions, at multiple price points, for a large number of customer-facing websites. Most customers of this type are consumer packaged goods companies who need interactive marketing and e-commerce solutions. On-demand hosting provides cost savings and flexibility through both technical and business efficiencies.

• Enterprise applications hosting. This customer seeks hosting of complex enterprise software, such as SAP and the Oracle E-Business Suite, or has other complex enterprise data center replacement needs. This is a lower-level service than data center outsourcing or application-specific services such as Infrastructure Utility for SAP (IU4SAP); it does not include application management or other specialized needs such as SAP Basis support. Rather, the hoster simply provides, and may manage, the underlying systems infrastructure. On-demand hosting provides cost savings via automation and simplified configuration and management.

Market Definition/Description

The term “Web hosting,” as used in this Magic Quadrant, refers to a specific set of products and services: dedicated hosting, utility hosting, virtual data center hosting (VDC hosting) and cloud hosting. Many of the providers also offer colocation. These services are defined as follows:

• Colocation includes Internet data center facilities, plus options such as remote hands and network bandwidth.
• Dedicated hosting includes facilities and network, plus dedicated server hardware. Managed and professional services may be optionally included.
• Utility hosting includes facilities, network and storage, plus a utility computing platform. This must be a shared environment using hypervisor-based virtualization, offering on-demand, flexible capacity. This may be offered in conjunction with dedicated infrastructure. Managed and professional services may be optionally included.
• VDC hosting is an outsourced “semi-private cloud” service, including facilities, network, storage and a multitenant utility computing platform that provides graphical user interface (GUI)-based self-administration.
• Cloud hosting includes facilities, network, storage and on-demand, multitenant elastic computing capacity, which can be either dedicated or virtualized. “Elastic” means that customers must be able to scale both up and down on demand, without a contractual commitment to capacity. Managed and professional services may be optionally included.

Hosting, as used in this Magic Quadrant, is distinct from both data center outsourcing and remote infrastructure management. The services are productized and standardized, although customization is available. There is no transfer of either assets or personnel, and the service is always offered in the hoster’s data center.

The term “on-demand hosting” refers to utility hosting, cloud hosting and VDC hosting. These services are defined in greater detail in “Web Hosting and Cloud Infrastructure Prices, North America, 2008.”

The term “cloud infrastructure services” refers to cloud hosting and VDC hosting. These services constitute the cloud system infrastructure component detailed in “Forecast: Sizing the Cloud; Understanding the Opportunities in Cloud Services.” In this Magic Quadrant, we evaluate these providers as Web hosters. If you are using this Magic Quadrant to evaluate cloud providers for other uses, such as scientific computing or other applications not based on Web technologies, the self-managed hosting use case will be the most similar to your needs, but you are likely to have requirements beyond the scope of that use case.

Managed services include management of components such as: the server operating system; Web servers, application servers and database servers; storage, including backup and recovery; security; and other network devices, such as application delivery controllers. Professional services include architecture, capacity planning, performance testing, security auditing and assistance in migrating from another hosting provider or from an internal data center.

Some customers choose a fully managed service, in which the Web hosting provider manages everything except the application code. Others prefer to choose from a menu of a la carte management services; for instance, some need just database administration services, while others want junior-level systems administration tasks like patch management handled for them but want to do all the complex work themselves. Also, the number of customers who want to self-manage is increasing rapidly; these IT managers want to take advantage of the cost efficiencies of a provider’s scale and automation tools, but do not want to relinquish control. Your choice should depend upon your needs and IT capabilities.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

To appear in this Magic Quadrant, vendors had to meet the following criteria:

• They must sell on-demand hosting as a stand-alone service within data centers they own or lease, without the requirement to bundle it with application development, application maintenance or other outsourcing. This service must be productized and available to the general public.
• Their services must be enterprise-class, offering 24/7 customer support (including phone support), service-level agreements and the ability to scale an application beyond the capacity of a single server.
• They must have significant market presence, as indicated by Web hosting revenue of at least $100 million in 2008, or on-demand hosting revenue of at least $20 million. Their hosting services must interest Gartner clients, Gartner analysts feel clients should take note of them, or they must regularly compete against offerings from other vendors represented on the Magic Quadrant.
• They must have referenceable customers in North America, Western Europe and Asia.

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