Author: Howard M. Cohen
For the past five years, Microsoft has been named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud AI Developer Services. This year they are joined in the leader quadrant by Google, Amazon, and IBM who barely snuck in at the lower left-hand corner of the leader quadrant.
The Gartner Magic Quadrant has a vertical and a horizontal axis. The higher a participant is on the vertical axis, the greater is Gartner’s estimation of their ability to execute.
Execute on what?
The further to the right a participant is, the greater is Gartner’s estimation of their completeness of vision. This can be considered the more important metric, given that it would be easy to achieve a very high degree of ability to execute on a very simplistic vision. The superior solution is furthest up and to the right, with the greatest completeness of vision and the highest ability to execute on that vision.
The Big Three
While there are ten cloud services featured on the Magic Quadrant for 2024, the most heated competition exists between the three most well-known and popular services, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, who are all way further up and to the right of the seven others.
Amazon has the highest ability to execute, but they are behind the other two in completeness of vision.
Google has the lowest ability to execute of the three but exceeds Amazon in completeness of vision.
Microsoft has the greatest completeness of vision and comes between Amazon and Google in ability to execute.
Source: www.gartner.com
According to Gartner, the Microsoft Intelligent Cloud group enjoyed double-digit growth between 2023 and 2024, and describes Microsoft as “a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its CAIDS offerings are Azure AI platform for language, vision and tabular use cases and GitHub Copilot, which has captured much of the early market for AI code assistants. Microsoft’s platform offers its partner ecosystem and enterprise customers rich solutions, such as support for spoken languages and dialects in its language tools, as well as video analysis and image model customization in its vision service.”
The Azure AI Ecosystem
The sheer number of AI-related services in Azure is far too extensive even to summarize in this post. At the foundation of this enormous ecosystem is Azure AI Foundry which, according to Microsoft, “is designed to empower your entire organization—developers, AI engineers, and IT professionals—to customize, host, run, and manage AI solutions with greater ease and confidence. This unified approach simplifies the development and management process, helping all stakeholders focus on driving innovation and achieving strategic goals.”
Services within this ecosystem include Azure Machine Learning, Azure AI Content Understanding, Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Search (Azure’s implementation of retrieval augmented generation (RAG)), Azure AI Content Safety, Azure AI Translator, Azure AI Speech, Azure AI Vision, Azure AI Language, Azure AI Documentation Intelligence and more. Any developer will enjoy finding themselves to be the proverbial “kid in the candy shop” when working in Azure AI Foundry. In fact, it even features a playground as Microsoft points out in describing the Azure AI Foundry:
- “Azure AI Foundry helps you experiment, develop, and deploy generative AI apps and APIs responsibly with a comprehensive platform. The Azure AI Foundry portal provides access to Azure AI services, foundation models, a playground, and resources to help you build, train, fine-tune, and deploy AI models. You can also evaluate model responses and orchestrate prompt application components with prompt flow for better performance.
In achieving their unmatched completeness of vision, Microsoft has also achieved a remarkably complete complement of functionalities and capabilities including an extensive catalog of large language models (LLM), a comprehensive set of AI development platforms and tools and generative AI tools, data platforms including Microsoft Fabric, Apache Spark-based data platforms, Azure Databricks Runtime for Machine Learning, data storage for AI including Fabric OneLake and Data Lake Storage, Data processing for AI including the Fabric Data Factory, Data connectors for AI, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI services for custom AI, Azure Machine Learning Studio, custom AI code languages, and more.
The Most Comfortable Cloud So You Can Sleep at Night
Once you’ve selected a cloud services provider you begin investing in their platform, which means you want to be confident you’ve selected the right provider from the outset.
Much goes into that decision. When you step into any workshop you want to know you have a complete complement of resources, so you don’t have to suddenly find yourself shopping elsewhere. You want to know that you have a breadth of choices for the various key resources you use in your application development. You want to know that your chosen platform will enable integration with the broadest possible cross-section of industry solutions and elements. Azure has demonstrated its ability to bring all that.
Finally, and perhaps most important, you want to know you’re working in a highly secure and resilient environment that won’t be readily disrupted by bad actors. You want the customer’s you develop solutions for to sleep better knowing there will not be sudden calamities. This is why Idenxt offers an exclusive “Sleepwell SLA.” We’ve applied advanced AI to protect your AI solutions, combined with the expertise of a seasoned set of experts and a well-orchestrated complement of custom and outsourced resources to provide the most effective, most elegant protection and application management service for your Azure implementations.
Talk to us about your planned Azure projects and how Idenxt can help assure their constant availability and optimum performance.
To learn more, contact us here.
