Niche Player: IBM

IBM Cloud’s operations are geographically diversified and focus primarily on lift-and-shift and extended enterprise use cases, according to Gartner. It’s focusing on investments including hybrid cloud, regulated workloads and industry-focused cloud services.

Strengths: IBM’s spinoff of its managed IT services business into a separate company—Kyndryl—will allow it to focus on higher-margin businesses such as IBM Cloud, which is doubling down on regulated workloads and industries. It has demonstrated innovation in edge computing.

Cautions: IBM still lags behind competitors in market share and cloud infrastructure and platform services capabilities. “Gartner clients view IBM as a provider of legacy technologies, and it is not often a consideration among shortlisted cloud providers as a result,“ Gartner said.