We’ve just completed our 2019 evaluations of cloud IaaS providers, resulting in a new Magic Quadrant, Critical Capabilities, and six Solution Scorecards — one for each of the providers included in the Magic Quadrant. This process has also resulted in fresh benchmarking data within Gartner’s Cloud Decisions tool, a SaaS offering available to Gartner for Technical Professionals clients, which contains benchmarks and monitoring results for many cloud providers.

As part of this, we are pleased to introduce Gartner’s new Solution Scorecards,  an updated document format for what we used to call In-Depth Assessments. Solution Scorecards assess an individual vendor solution against our recently-revised Solution Criteria (formerly branded Evaluation Criteria). They are highly detailed documents — typically 60 pages or so, assessing 265 individual capabilities as well as providing broader recommendations to Gartner clients.

The criteria are always divided into Required, Preferred, and Optional categories — essentially, things that everyone wants (and where they need to compensate/risk-mitigate if something is missing), things that most people want but can live without or work around readily, and things that are use case-specific. The Required, Preferred, and Optional criteria are weighted into a 4:2:1 ratio in order to calculate an overall Solution Score.

2019 Scores

If you are a Gartner for Technical Professionals client, the scorecards are available to you today. You can access them from the links below (Gartner paywall):

• Amazon Web Services
• Microsoft Azure
• Google Cloud Platform
• IBM Cloud
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
• Alibaba Cloud International (English-language offerings available outside of China)

We will be providing a comparison of these vendors and their Solution Scorecards at the annual “Cloud Wars” presentation at the Gartner Catalyst conference — one of numerous great reasons to come to San Diego the week of August 11th (or Catalyst UK in London the week of September 15th)! Catalyst has tons of great content for cloud architects and other technical professionals involved in implementing cloud computing. 

Note that we are specifically assessing just the integrated IaaS+PaaS offerings — everything offered through a single integrated self-service experience and on a single contract. Also, only cloud services count; capabilities offered as software, hosting, or a human-managed service do not count. Capabilities also have to be first-party.

Also note that this is not a full evaluation of a cloud provider’s entire portfolio. The scorecards have “IaaS” in the title, and the scope is specified clearly in the Solution Criteria. For the details of which specific provider services or products were or were not evaluated, please refer to each specific Scorecard document.

All the scores are current as of the end of March, and count only generally-available (GA) capabilities. Because it takes weeks to work with vendors for them to review and ensure accuracy, and time to edit and publish, some capabilities will have gone beta or GA since that time; because we only score what we’re able to test, the evaluation period has a cut-off date. After that, we update the document text for accuracy but we don’t change the numerical scores. We expect to update the Solution Scorecards approximately every 6 months, and working to increase our cadence for evaluation updates.

This year’s scores vs. last year’s

When you review the scores, you’ll see that broadly, the scores are lower than they were in 2018, even though all the providers have improved their capabilities. There are several reasons why the 2019 scores are lower than in previous years. (For a full explanation of the revision of the Solution Criteria in 2019, see the related blog post.)

First, for many feature-sets, several Required criteria were consolidated into a single multi-part criterion with “table stakes” functionality; missing any part of that criterion caused the vendor to receive a “No” score for that criterion (“Yes” is 1 point; “No” is zero points; there is no partial credit). The scorecard text explains how the vendor does or does not meet each portion of a criterion. The text also mentions if there is beta functionality, or if a feature was introduced after the evaluation period.

Second, many criteria that were Preferred in 2018 were promoted to Required in 2019, due to increasing customer expectations. Similarly, many criteria that were Optional in 2018 are now Preferred. We introduced some brand-new criteria to all three categories as well, but providers that might have done well primarily on table-stakes Required functionality in previous years may have scored lower this year due to the increased customer expectations reflected by revised and new criteria.

Customizing the scores

The solution criteria, with all of the criteria detail, is available to all Gartner for Technical  Professionals clients, and comes with a spreadsheet that allows you to score any provider yourself; we also provide a filled-out spreadsheet with each Solution Scorecard so you can adapt the evaluation for your own needs. The Solution Scorecards are similarly transparent on which parts of a criterion are or aren’t met, and we link to documentation that provides evidence for each point (in some cases Gartner was provided with NDA information, in which case we tell you how to get that info from the provider). 

This allows you to customize the scores as you see fit. Thus, if you decide that getting 3 out of 4 elements of a criteria is good enough for you, or you think that the thing they miss isn’t relevant to you, or you want to give the provider credit for newly-released capabilities, or you want to do region-specific scoring, you can modify the spreadsheet accordingly. 

If you’re a Gartner client and are interested in discussing the solution criteria, assessment process, and the cloud providers, please schedule an inquiry or a 1-on-1 at Catalyst. We’d be happy to talk to you!