The market watcher’s 2021 Magic Quadrant for cloud infrastructure and platform services has all three firms listed as market leaders, with Gartner going on to list their respective strengths in different areas.

For example, the overall market leader, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is praised in the report for the continued pace of innovation it displays, as well as its financial standing and the investments it is making in developing its own CPU technology.

Second-placed Microsoft has a “broadly appealing” product portfolio for enterprises that is more expansive than any other provider in the market, given that it spans the software-, infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service categories, said Gartner.

The company also benefits from the “trust” that enterprises hold in Microsoft, which has been built up over many years, and confers a competitive advantage on the firm in “nearly every vertical market”, said Gartner.

Google Cloud rounds out the top three, with Gartner flagging as strengths its “impressive” revenue growth figures over the previous 12 months, and the fact that it is gaining “mind share” with enterprises.

Gartner also highlighted Google’s year-on-year improvements from an innovation perspective, which are helping it close the “meaningful gaps” that exist between the firm and its nearest competitors, Amazon and Microsoft, from a technology perspective.

“For example, Google Cloud Platform has the most fully-featured Kubernetes service of any provider in this market,” said the Gartner report.

The report detailed several areas for each of the providers that Gartner and its subscriber base considered weak points in their offerings, with Amazon, Google and Microsoft all coming under fire for their sales tactics.

Google stands accused in the report of luring in clients with “aggressive pricing” that undercuts its competitors, but with the business unit currently operating at a financial loss, this discounting is likely to taper off over time, said Gartner.

Gartner also pointed to issues with “post-sales satisfaction” from Google customers. “Some Gartner clients have a poor experience dealing with GCP after committing to use the platform,” it said. “Much of this stems from the rapid growth of GCP and the organisational immaturity that results.”

In a similar vein, Gartner clients said they had experienced a heavy-handedness from Amazon over the past 12 months, with its sales teams reportedly piling pressure on customers to up their spending with the public cloud giant.

“Dozens of Gartner subscribers across multiple geographies have reported unexpected pressure from AWS sales, which has sharply accelerated over the past year, to increase annual spend commitments by 20% to renew existing contracts,” said the report.

It went on to suggest that Gartner clients that are unhappy with feeling pressurised to spend more money with Amazon can push back. “Since these customers typically have significant dependence on the platform, they may feel as if they have limited recourse,” it said. “However, the pressure to increase spend is not AWS’s policy and will be eliminated if the customer escalates.”

The technical complexity of Amazon’s growing portfolio of cloud products was also flagged as a concern by Gartner, with the firm sharing anecdotal evidence that enterprises users often require third-party assistance when trying to make the most of its technologies.

“Discerning between the multitude of solutions, such as those related to containers, databases and data management, requires substantial technical skills in order to appreciate the differences between the offerings and make the appropriate choice,” said the Gartner report.

Complexity, from a licensing perspective, was listed as a drawback by Gartner for Microsoft, which also alluded to clients experiencing “sales pressure” of another kind when dealing with the software giant.

“Microsoft has very complex licensing and contracting, and a complex account management structure with uneven cloud skills in the field,” said the report. “Further, Microsoft sales pressures to grow overall account revenue prevent it from effectively deploying Azure to bring down its customers’ total Microsoft costs.”

The resilience of Microsoft’s public cloud platform also remains an enduring concern for Gartner clients, who are concerned about the “real-world impacts” when critical services such as Azure Active Directory suffer outages, such as the one that occured in March this year.

“Further, Microsoft continues to react slowly to the roll-out of [datacentre availability zones] with the likelihood that some regions will never be equipped with such resiliency capabilities,” said the report. “Services such as the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) continue to experience some outages, particularly in association with updates and maintenance events.”

Computer Weekly contacted all three providers for a response to Gartner’s comments, but had not received a response at the time of publication.