Microsoft Named a Leader in Gartner’s Server Virtualization Magic Quadrant for Fifth Consecutive Year

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Microsoft’s datacenter platform technology is critical to IT. Windows Server is the most broadly deployed server OS on the planet and 2 out of every 3 enterprise seats are covered with System Center. We believe that cost savings and the ability to simply modernize IT assets continually bring customers such as King County and UConn Health to our solutions as they transform their datacenter for today’s cloud-first world.

We are pleased to share that Gartner recently published their Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization and Microsoft has been named a Leader for the fifth year in a row for Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V and System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager. Gartner positions Microsoft in the Leaders’ Quadrant based on its completeness of vision and ability to execute in the market.

We believe our position in this report, coupled with our leadership position in the Magic Quadrant for Infrastructure-as-a Service, validates our differentiated hybrid strategy to provide customers with Azure-like capabilities for both on-premises Hyper-V and Azure services. Microsoft is also currently the only vendor to be positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrants for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Application Platform as a Service, Cloud Storage Services and Server Virtualization, further substantiating our strategy to support customers with a comprehensive solution of IaaS and PaaS services whether hosted in our cloud, delivered via service provider, or in their datacenter.

These graphics were published by Gartner, Inc. as part of larger research documents and should be evaluated in the context of the entire documents. The Gartner documents are available upon request here.

Transforming Customers’ Datacenters for the Cloud-First World

Our completeness of vision is tied to consistency in delivering new innovation that addresses the needs of our customers as they transform their datacenter to harness the power of the cloud. As we announced at Ignite, we are enhancing the Windows Server operating system and application platform for enterprise applications such as SQL Server and Exchange, as well as modern applications. Windows Server 2016 will include: Nano Server, a purpose-built OS to power born-in-the-cloud applications, containers, and on-premises software-defined datacenter solutions; Windows Server  and Hyper-V Containers, which leverage our deep virtualization experience to deliver the benefits of containers to our customers; and Azure Service Fabric, a platform for building, hosting and managing cloud services that automatically scale, update and self-heal for high-availability.

We are also further blurring the lines between our on-premises offerings and Azure as we take the next step in our hybrid strategy. With the recently announced Microsoft Azure Stack, customers will be able to take advantage of our latest cloud innovations in Azure IaaS and PaaS services in their datacenter, to improve service delivery models and increase agility. Further, we continue to enhance System Center, and are delivering the now-available Microsoft Operations Management Suite, which extends System Center to enable customers to manage workloads across Windows and Linux, Azure or AWS, VMware or OpenStack, all from a single console.

If you’d like to read the full report, “Gartner: Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization,” it can be requested here.

*Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.