« Leader »… but by a narrow margin. That was Oracle’s standing in the public cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service Magic Quadrant in 2023 and 2024 alike.
Year over year, its position changed little. Both on the “vision” axis (forward-looking, strategy-oriented) and on the “execution” axis (ability to actually meet demand), Larry Ellison’s company remained well behind Amazon, Google and Microsoft, clustering rather with IBM and Alibaba Cloud.
Since then, the gap with the “big three” has narrowed, thanks to progress on both axes.
Oracle: customer trust under scrutiny
As last year, Gartner gave Oracle credit for its cloud in the “distributed” and “sovereign” categories, noting its ability to maintain feature parity and pricing parity with the rest of the offering. Another element that was praised again is multicloud support, both in terms of network links (private connections between OCI and Azure / GCP) and in terms of databases (deployment options for Exadata and Autonomous Database within the datacenters of AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft).
Last year, Gartner had urged caution regarding Oracle’s GenAI services, which were seen as less complete than those of other “leaders” in the Magic Quadrant and with regionally limited availability. It also flagged licensing and support terms as a potential friction point in renewing contracts. It noted that the standard regional architecture included only one availability domain and that some customers lamented the shortage of third‑party resources—reflecting a community still smaller than that of competitors.
This year, Gartner turns its attention to Oracle’s sector strategy. Unlike direct competitors that bring use cases right on their platform, Oracle delivers its solutions (Fusion, Industry Applications) separately, positioning OCI solely as an infrastructure foundation. The firm also highlights a “loss of trust” triggered by a security incident that occurred in early 2025, or rather by how it was handled. On the surface, Oracle has largely denied any OCI flaw. Strictly speaking, it can claim to be correct—the issue, localized in the SSO component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, affected legacy servers of the Oracle Classic generation. Still, it enabled the exfiltration, among others, of customer credentials, with some of the most recent tokens dating from 2024.
8 providers, 4 “Leaders”
Eight providers—the same lineup since 2022*—make up the Magic Quadrant for public cloud infrastructure.
On the “execution” axis, the landscape is as follows:
| Rank | Provider | Year-over-year Change |
| 1 | AWS | = |
| 2 | = | |
| 3 | Microsoft | = |
| 4 | Oracle | = |
| 5 | Alibaba Cloud | = |
| 6 | IBM | = |
| 7 | Huawei | = |
| 8 | Tencent Cloud | = |
On the “vision” axis:
| Rank | Provider | Year-over-year Change |
| 1 | +1 | |
| 2 | AWS | +1 |
| 3 | Microsoft | -2 |
| 4 | Oracle | = |
| 5 | Alibaba Cloud | = |
| 6 | IBM | +1 |
| 7 | Huawei Cloud | -1 |
| 8 | Tencent Cloud | = |
Resource shortages persist at Microsoft
Last year, security was flagged as a weak point for Microsoft. Behind the scenes, U.S. government conclusions cited “inadequate cyber hygiene” after breaches in the Exchange email system of a federal agency (attack in 2023 attributed to Chinese hackers). Gartner also noted:
- A lag in the technical quality of the partner network
- Services and support perceived as weaker than those of the leading competitors
- Capacity shortages, particularly in Amsterdam and Texas
These shortages remain in various regions, according to customer feedback. A certain frustration also centers on cost-management capabilities. Gartner adds that Microsoft’s AI offering remains heavily dependent on external providers—with OpenAI playing a prominent role.
That said, the firm notes that Microsoft currently appears the most capable of putting AI into end users’ hands. Other strengths include the integration of Azure services with the rest of its portfolio and multicloud support (Azure Local, Azure Arc, and Azure IoT).
The legacy remains a sensitive point for Google Cloud
Last year, Gartner highlighted Google Cloud’s product capabilities, including Vertex AI and Apigee, while praising the level of AI integration in database offerings. This time, the perspective broadens to focus on the AI stack—from in-house chips (TPU) to the Agentspace framework that blends agents with enterprise search. It adds a comprehensive sovereign cloud portfolio, featuring local controls (Data Boundary), an air-gapped option, and partner-operated dedicated regions.
Yet the legacy remains a sensitive issue, even if progress has been made through the VMware partnership. The quality of support and account management is another challenge: it remains inconsistent, especially for premium customers and partners outside North America. Gartner also regrets the lack of explicit and clear integration between GCP and Google Workspace.
SaaS and multicloud are not AWS’s strong suit
AWS does not have this problem, chiefly because it does not offer its own office suite. This is the emblem Gartner presents of a SaaS gap relative to the rest of the vendors in this Magic Quadrant. The gap extends to the low-code application platform (LCAP) segment, where Amazon Q Apps and Amazon App Studio trail several years behind some competitors.
Gartner adds to the list the lack of competitiveness of AWS’s in-house generative AI models (the Titan family), already flagged last year. It does applaud AWS’s mastery of the rest of the GenAI stack, starting with its chips (Graviton, Inferentia, Trainium). Other strengths include an unparalleled community in this market—and the scale of operations, with a long track record of availability and a robust capacity to supply resources, especially GPUs.
* In 2022, Oracle moved to the “Visionaries” group after four years in the “Niche Players” category (2018-2021). Previously (until 2017), the criteria were less strict, allowing providers such as CenturyLink, Fujitsu, NTT Communications, Rackspace, or Virtustream to appear in the Magic Quadrant (which at the time only covered IaaS).
