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AWS Scores High Marks for Data Management Analytics

• By David Ramel
• 03/12/2018

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) dominates a "Magic Quadrant" study from research firm Gartner Inc. examining the Data Management Solutions for Analytics market, which involves Big Data, data warehouses and more.

AWS was not only named a "Leader" in the field, but the cloud service is also referenced as the underlying platform backing the offerings of many other competing vendors.

"AWS is the dominant cloud vendor by a significant margin, with only Microsoft even close in terms of market share and presence," Gartner said in its "Magic Quadrant for Data Management Solutions for Analytics" report. "This dominance provides increased network effects for all its services, because the sources of data for a DMSA use case are more likely to reside in an AWS service than in a service from any other cloud vendor."

Gartner defines DMSA as "a complete software system that supports and manages data in one or more file management systems (usually databases)."

The research firm defined four primary use cases for DMSAs:

• Traditional data warehouse
• Real-time data warehouse
• Context-independent data warehouse
• Logical data warehouse (LDW)

In the report, published last month, AWS made the "Leaders" quadrant along with Oracle, Microsoft, Teradata, IBM and SAP. It trailed only Oracle on the "ability to execute" axis, and only Oracle, Microsoft and Teradata on the "completeness of vision" axis.

Gartner's AWS research focuses largely on Amazon Redshift, the cloud-based data warehouse service, and associated offerings.

AWS was singled out by Gartner for its "best-fit solution approach" that provides different services for different use cases, along with its low-cost, pay-as-you-go pricing.

After listing the aforementioned "strengths" of AWS, Gartner said its "weaknesses" include: no on-premises offerings, an evolving Redshift architecture and integration complexity.

"The cloud has established itself as a Tier 1 platform for DMSA deployment," Gartner said. "Pure-play cloud vendor AWS appears in the Leaders quadrant for a second year, and all the Leaders are investing heavily in the cloud. Snowflake has emerged from the Niche Players quadrant as a Challenger, thanks to strengthened execution. New entrants to the Magic Quadrant include Alibaba Cloud, Qubole and Treasure Data, each with pure-play cloud offerings."