We are honored to be recognized by Gartner® as a Leader in the recently published 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Strategic Cloud Platform Services (SCPS). In the report, Gartner placed Microsoft furthest in Completeness of Vision.

For years, we’ve understood that the industry trusts Gartner Magic Quadrant reports to provide a holistic review of cloud providers’ capabilities. We’re pleased by this placement in the Gartner report as we continue to prioritize investments to make Azure the global cloud computing platform powering transformation and growth—enabling new possibilities for organizations to embrace the latest technologies and to advance at a rapid pace. With highly secure, state-of-the-art Azure datacenters designed with data residency in mind, Azure hosts one of the most advanced supercomputers in the world.

The Gartner report validates our commitment to empowering customers to reach new heights. We are proud of our purpose-built cloud infrastructure for the era of AI, one that is adaptive across on-prem, multicloud and edge environments, for our complete development platform with advanced tools to accelerate developer productivity, for our AI services and tools to empower innovation, and for our extensive partnerships across a wide range of industry leaders to give customers the choices they desire.

We are honored for this recognition and will continue to build the future together with our customers, no matter where they are in the cloud journey.

Purpose-built cloud infrastructure for the era of AI

We continue to build our AI infrastructure in close collaboration with silicon providers and industry leaders, incorporating the latest innovations in software, power, models, and silicon. Azure works closely with NVIDIA to provide NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core (GPU) graphics processing unit-based virtual machines (VMs) for mid to large-scale AI workloads. We’ve also expanded our partnership with AMD, enabling our customers with choices to meet their unique business needs. These investments have allowed Azure to pioneer performance for AI supercomputing in the cloud and have consistently ranked us as the number one cloud in the top 500 of the world’s supercomputers.

With these additions to the Azure infrastructure hardware portfolio, our platform enables us to deliver the best performance and efficiency across all workloads.

An adaptive cloud across on-prem, multicloud and edge environments

The cloud is evolving to support customer workloads wherever they’re needed. We realize cloud migration is not a one-size-fits-all approach, and that’s why we’re committed to meeting customers where they are in their cloud journey. With Azure you have an adaptive cloud that enables you to thrive in dynamic environments by unifying siloed teams, distributed sites, and sprawling systems into single operations, application, and data model in Azure. 

Azure Arc helps customers implement their adaptive cloud strategies, providing a bridge that extends the Azure platform and enables them to build applications and services across datacenters, at the edge, and in multicloud environments. Through a portfolio of services, tools, and infrastructure, organizations can take advantage of Azure services within a single control plane. And with the recent general availability of VMware vSphere enabled by Azure Arc that brings together Azure and the VMware vSphere infrastructure, VMware administrators can empower their developers to use Azure technologies with their existing server-based workloads and new Kubernetes workloads all from Azure.

Every day, cloud administrators and IT professionals are being asked to do more. We consistently hear from customers they’re tasked with a wider range of operations; they are required to collaborate with more users, and support more complex needs to deliver on increasing customer demand—all while integrating more workloads into their cloud environment. To support our customers, we recently launched the public preview of Microsoft Copilot for Azure, a new solution built into Azure that will help simplify how they design, operate, or troubleshoot apps and infrastructure from cloud to edge.

One location to build, test, and deploy AI innovations securely

We’re only just starting to understand the potential of generative AI and how it will transform the way we live and work. Developers are at the heart of this new wave of innovation, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. With a cloud-first approach developers spend less time on maintaining apps and infrastructure and more time on innovating and ideating, reducing the time to market. What’s more, developers can build with confidence, knowing that Azure has built-in tools and technologies to help ensure a secure and responsible approach from development to deployment.

The public preview of Azure AI Studio gives developers everything they need to build, test, and deploy AI innovations in one convenient location: cutting-edge models, data integration for retrieval augmented generation (RAG), intelligent search capabilities, full-lifecycle model management, and content safety. Azure AI Content Safety is available in Azure AI Studio so developers can easily evaluate model responses all in one unified development platform to quickly and efficiently detect offensive or inappropriate content in text and images, Customers like Heineken, Thread, Moveworks, Manulife , and so many more are putting Azure AI technologies to work for their businesses and their own customers and employees.

Integrated, AI-based tools to help developers innovate efficiently

The integration of AI-based tools in the development cycle is not just accelerating innovation, but also enabling developers to spend more time on strategic, meaningful work, and less time on tasks like debugging and infrastructure management. With Microsoft DevBox, developers can streamline development with secure, ready-to-code workstations in the cloud, leveraging self-service access to high-performance, cloud-based workstations preconfigured and ready-to-code for specific projects. GitHub Copilot uses AI technology to suggest code in the editor maximizing time spent on business logic over boilerplate, with developers reporting they can complete tasks up to 55% faster and feel up to 88% more productive.

With tools that are designed to work seamlessly together, Microsoft’s complete development platform stack empowers developers with flexible solutions, so they can build next-gen apps productively and securely, where they want. GitHub integrates with Azure to provide a continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipeline for developers, and with GitHub Enterprise they can be more efficient with up to 75% improvement in time spent managing tools and code infrastructure. Customers like GM are collaborating with Microsoft to help speed up innovation within their organization, test and learn, and create agile environments using Microsoft development platforms such as GitHub, Visual Studio and Microsoft DevBox. 

Create differentiated AI experiences with cloud-native apps

Azure’s cloud-native platform is the best place to run and scale applications while seamlessly embedding Azure’s native AI services. Azure gives developers the choice between control and flexibility, with complete focus on productivity regardless of what option is chosen. Azure App Service allows developers to host .NET, Java, Node.js, and Python web apps and APIs in a fully managed Azure service. Azure takes care of all the infrastructure management like high availability, load balancing, and autoscaling enabling developers to accelerate app development to production up to 50 percent with fully-managed Azure App Service. Developers can further streamline the development process for faster time to market with cloud-based tools and services including Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), GitHub Enterprise and Advanced Security, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Cognitive Services. And with Microsoft Copilot for Azure, developers have an AI companion to help them design, operate, optimize, and troubleshoot everyday tasks with AKS and Kubernetes. Customers such as Sapiens have leveraged the synergy between cloud-native technologies and AI to accelerate their digital transformation and deliver more value to their end users with intelligent apps.

Building the future together

We are dedicated to empowering our customers with technology that unlocks limitless innovation, helping them wherever they are on their technology journey. We use the decades of experience we have in migrating Microsoft’s on-premises workloads to the cloud, to inform how we make it easier for customers and partners to use the cloud—from how we build products, to the real-world migration guidance we provide. It’s why 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies trust Azure with their business on Azure. Customers like AT&T rely on Azure AI for Enterprise Chat GPT and better knowledge mining and the World Bank who is using Azure cloud-based solution to centralized monitoring, performance, resource consumption, and security management across clouds, all in a single package.

And we are not doing this alone. We have a vast global partner network and a growing number of technology partnerships across a wide range of industry leaders such as, Databricks, Netapp, NVIDIA, Oracle, OpenAI, SAP, Snowflake, VMware, and others. We recently announced a partnership to bring Oracle Database Services into Azure to help maximize efficiency and resiliency for our mutual customers’ businesses. Our investments with SAP continue to grow, enhancing performance and resilience for mission critical workloads with new powerful infrastructure options for our SAP customers such as the Azure M-series Mv3 family, the next generation of memory optimized virtual machines (VMs). As we expand partnerships with OpenAI, Meta and Hugging Face, we create more opportunities for organizations and developers to build generative AI experiences, offering the most comprehensive selection of frontier, open and commercial models.

As Microsoft continues to innovate at the speed of AI, Azure is at the foundation of all our innovation, powering all aspects of the Microsoft Cloud and our copilots. Azure makes it possible for organizations to securely embrace the latest technologies and leverage them to create new ones. We endlessly optimize our infrastructure to bring faster, secure, reliable, and more sustainable computing power, so that our customers and partners can build with confidence. Linked by one of the largest interconnected networks on the planet, we’re providing unprecedented scalability, low latency, data residency, and high availability to our customers around the world. Azure provides the cloud platform wherever you are with highly secure, state-of the art Azure datacenters, offering 60+ regions—more than any other cloud provider.

With Azure, customers can trust they are on a secure and well-managed foundation to utilize the latest advancements in AI and cloud-native services, safely and responsibly, to create today’s solutions and tomorrow’s breakthroughs. We are dedicated to the success of our customers and partners, and continue to invest in ways that ensure Azure is the leading choice for customers, big and small around the globe.

Discover resources for your cloud journey

• Learn more about Azure Migrate and Modernize and Azure Innovate and how they can help you from migration to AI innovation.
• Check out the new and free Azure Migrate application and code assessment feature to save on application migrations.
• Find out how to take your AI ambitions from ideation to reality with Azure. 
• For the latest Azure innovations watch our Ignite 2023 sessions on demand.

---

Disclaimer: 

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services, David Wright, Dennis Smith, and 4 more, 4 December 2023.

The report was previously known as Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services (2020-2022) and Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service till 2019. 

Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request here.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.