Category leaders land on top thanks to broad product portfolios, compliance expertise, and extensive partnerships, according to ISG.
The ISG Provider Lens Quadrant Report on public cloud providers puts Accenture at the top of list of companies that provide consulting and transformational services for large accounts.
Image: ISG
Accenture, Amazon Web Services, and Deloitte are the strongest cloud providers, according to a new report from the Information Services Group. Accenture took the top spot in two categories—consulting and transformation services and managed public cloud services. AWS was the leader in hyperscale infrastructure and SAP HANA infrastructure services. Deloitte ranked highest among the four leaders in the governance, risk and compliance services category.
The ISG Provider Lens Quadrant Report of public cloud providers assesses solutions and services based on portfolio attractiveness and competitive strength.
The global infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market grew by 14% year over year in the third quarter, according to data from the ISG iIndex. Through the first three quarters of 2020, IaaS was up nearly 20% to $17.8 billion, per the report.
ISG identified these broad trends in the cloud market:
- Cloud-native focused transformation instead of lift-and-shift
- Vertical-specific offerings to support industry compliance
- Multicloud as the new norm
- Increase in managed services to cover hybrid and multicloud infrastructure
- Growing demand for cloud governance, risk management, and compliance services
- Rising need for infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service
- HANA is the new SAP way
The report covers the full range of cloud services including:
- Consulting and transformation services (large and small accounts)
- Governance, risk, and compliance services
- Managed public cloud services (large and small accounts)
- Hyperscale infrastructure and platform services
- SAP HANA infrastructure services
ISG has four labels for providers: Leader, product challenger, market challenger, and contender. The report also identifies “rising stars” that have strong potential to move into the leader quadrant. The report includes a detailed review of the leaders in each quadrant as well as a profile of any rising stars in the category.
SEE: Top cloud providers in 2020: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, hybrid, SaaS players (TechRepublic)
Here is a brief review of each of the five categories that includes the leaders and rising stars for each one.
Consulting and transformation services
ISG identified seven leaders and one rising star in this category. Accenture is at the top of the list. Accenture’s strengths are its consulting practice, its robust partnerships with hyperscalers such as AWS, Alibaba, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, and its vertical-specific competency. ISG recommends that Accenture expand its reach by creating more affordable service plans for midmarket and smaller companies.
The complete list of leaders in the large account category are:
- Accenture
- Cognizant
- Capgemini
- HCL
- IBM
- TCS
- Wipro
Infosys is the up and comer in this category. The global IT company based in India won this designation due to the fact that it recently won several large transformation deals. Infosys also has been steadily growing its public cloud consulting.
Governance, risk, and compliance services
There are four leaders in this category with Deloitte at the top of the list followed by PwC, KPMG, and EY. Deloitte’s strengths are robust risk intelligence, large scale of operations, and platform-embedded security. ISG notes that there is a thin line between the company’s cloud-consulting division and the governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) services division, which may lead to a conflict of interest.
Accenture is the one rising star. The company’s strengths are its strong public sector focus and comprehensive GRC solution, according to ISG.
Managed public cloud services
ISG notes that this ecosystem has been growing at a faster rate as overall cloud adoption rises.
There are eight leaders in this category with Accenture at the top. The report notes that Accdenture has invested almost $1 billion in training employees with an emphasis on cloud technology. This training investment is one the company’s strengths along with industry-specific solutions and hyper-automation capabilities. ISG recommends that Accenture standardize its “overwhelming” portfolio of offerings to reduce overall complexity.
NTT Data is the rising star. This global IT services provider is based in Tokyo with a North American headquarters in Texas. ISG listed the company’s strengths in promoting automation and containers as two strengths along with its ability to leverage the extended NTT group, which includes data and communications groups.
Hyperscale infrastructure and platform services
This category has three leaders—AWS, Microsoft, and Google—and no rising stars. ISG identifies AWS’s first-mover advantage as the reason for its dominance in the infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service space. The company’s other strengths are the broad and deep nature of its cloud services portfolio, rapid innovation, and growing machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities. ISG also recommends that AWS simplify its large product portfolio, pricing, tooling, and services to reduce the amount of hand-holding that customers require to understand all the options.
SAP HANA infrastructure services
In this category, ISG looked for providers capable of hosting SAP’s software portfolio, namely SAP S/4HANA workloads and large-scale HANA databases. Providers had to have a clear strategy and structured approach to handling these workloads and knowledge of the complexities of migration and operations.
There are only two leaders in this category with American Web Services (AWS) rating higher than Microsoft. AWS took the top spot due to its wide range and scale, excellent migration programs and dedicated SAP competency and SAP accreditation in place for partners, per the report.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is identified as a rising star thanks to its rapid migration program, ability to run legacy SAP workloads, and continued investments in infrastructure. ISG recommends that GCP increase its SAP-specific infrastructure footprint to keep up with the two leaders and to meet the increase in demand from enterprise customers for SAP workloads to be migrated to the public cloud.
Shashank Rajmane is the lead author of the report, Jan Erik Aase is the editor, and Prakash N contributed enterprise context and global summaries.
