Only The Hyper-Scalers Remain

Last year's Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud infrastructure-as-a-Service was chock full of cloud providers. The 2017 report even picked up a few companies from the previous year, seeming to suggest the trend of market consolidation in the industry was subsiding.

But the researcher modified its evaluation criteria in 2018, limiting its analysis to vendors that could, or were, developing capabilities to deliver strategic cloud adoption across a broad range of use cases.

That drastically pared the field while also pushing several surviving providers into a lower quadrant.

Gartner found only six hyper-scale cloud operators worthy of inclusion in its latest report. The industry's Big 3 -- Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform -- all made the Leaders Quadrant. Oracle, Alibaba and IBM couldn't do better than Niche Player status.

Rackspace, NTT Communications, Virtustream, Skytap, Fujitsu, Interoute, Joyent and CenturyLink all fell off the Quadrant entirely.