We are honored to once again be recognized by Gartner® as a Leader in the recently published 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Strategic Cloud Platform Services (SCPS). In the report, Gartner placed Microsoft furthest in Completeness of Vision. We take pride in being recognized as a Leader again in this Magic Quadrant.

Microsoft offers a comprehensive platform with industry-leading AI and cloud services for organizations to innovate with confidence. Microsoft Azure provides a full range of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions that cater to every enterprise IT scenario. Azure’s strong adaptive cloud functionality allows businesses to seamlessly integrate their on-premises, multicloud, and edge environments with the cloud.

AI is reenergizing the promise of technology and transforming industries faster than we thought possible. Being ready to transform with AI means that businesses need to have a clear strategic vision, invest in data infrastructure, foster cross-functional collaboration, upskill their workforce, and integrate advanced technologies into their core operations to drive efficiency. Azure offers the flexibility required, whether it’s operating across distributed environments from hybrid, multicloud, and edge, or deploying various workloads and data sources tailored to their business needs. As our customers grow their businesses, they want a trusted, industry-leading partner to safeguard their data, ensure compliance, help modernize their data estate and infrastructure, and enable them to build intelligent applications that meet the demands of substantial data processing and computing power.

A cloud platform that supports your innovations

Azure’s strength as a platform lies in its ability to advance your organization with industry-leading AI and cloud services; it is refined in every layer from silicon to software and custom designed to deliver the performance you need for AI and any type of workloads. And no matter the use case, Azure AI has you covered. We have the broadest selection of models—from Microsoft’s small language models, Phi-3 family, to frontier, and open models including OpenAI and models from Meta, Mistral, and Cohere.

Microsoft has the expertise and scale to run the AI supercomputers that power some of the world’s biggest AI services, such as Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, ChatGPT, Bing, and more. Our end-to-end systems innovation leveraging the best silicon across the industry from partners such as Nvidia, AMD, and Intel as well as our in-house Maia and Cobalt, to innovations such as Hollow Core Fiber and Azure Boost, optimizes at every layer for performance and efficiency, while supporting all applications and data that integrate with the AI models you use.

We now have more than 60,000 customers using Azure AI and seeing the benefits of automation, personal productivity, customer engagement, and the creation of net new products. Our platform also enables large-scale generative AI experiences with built-in safety and security. By providing developers with a comprehensive set of cloud-based AI services and tools, Azure AI allows them to build intelligent applications without requiring specialized AI or data science expertise.

For example, Mercedes-Benz aimed to provide a highly personalized experience for customers that aligns with their habits, predicts their needs, and most importantly, ensures drivers keep their attention on the road. Powered by Azure OpenAI Service, the company’s MBUX in-car voice assistant offers a unique ability to understand voice commands and facilitate interactive conversations. Unlike regular voice assistants that need exact commands, GPT-4 delivered through Azure OpenAI can handle complex follow-up questions and keep track of context.

Your choice of environment, workloads, and technology

Customers want the choice to transform in ways that best suit their business. Whether it’s leveraging the best of open source, operating across the globe, or running workloads and processing data across hybrid, multicloud, and edge environments, Azure provides the flexibility to do so.

With more than 300 datacenters across 34 countries, Microsoft’s infrastructure brings applications closer to users, ensures data residency, and offers robust compliance and resiliency options for our customers. We are consistently investing in expanding our global capacity to meet customers’ growing needs. This extensive network, combined with our holistic strategy, provides our customers the flexibility to achieve optimal performance, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness regardless of their location, the workloads they manage, or the open-source technologies—including Linux—that they employ.

It’s important that organizations have the choice to use the technology best suited to their business and that their developers can thrive using the open-source software of their choice. Azure offers top-tier support for a wide range of technologies, whether you’re focusing on different operating systems such as Linux, languages like Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby, databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, or MongoDB, cloud-native services with Kubernetes, or even frameworks such as Hadoop or WordPress. SWISS International Air Lines recognized that migrating to Azure would boost flexibility, add volume, and lower costs while allowing them to use Java, Oracle, MySQL, or .NET.

Beyond open source, our deep partnerships with other enterprise market leaders such as SAP, VMware, Oracle, Databricks, Citrix, and NetApp give our customers flexibility to run mission critical enterprise workloads on Azure with optimal performance and security.

For the second consecutive year, Microsoft is also named a leader in the new 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure. With Microsoft’s adaptive cloud approach, you can streamline your operations, increase scalability, and reduce costs while maintaining flexibility and control over your cloud environments. 

Our commitment to leading responsibly as a cloud provider

Choosing a cloud platform to boost your innovation isn’t just about having a robust AI-driven system. It’s crucial to make sure the platform is fundamentally secure. Microsoft is dedicated to Trustworthy AI and developing industry leading technology to support it. Our commitments and capabilities work together to protect our customers and developers at all levels.

At Microsoft, trust is paramount, and our expanded Secure Future Initiative (SFI) highlights our dedication to security, safety, and privacy. We recently shared our first SFI Progress Report, covering updates in culture, governance, technology, and operations. Guided by the principles of secure by design, secure by default, and secure operations, this report reaffirms our commitment to security. We have significantly invested in governance structures, policies, tools, and processes to safely develop and deploy AI. 

Our customers keep benefiting from this partnership and our Responsible AI principles. SOPHiA GENETICS, a Swiss company offering data-driven healthcare solutions, developed a cloud-based platform using AI to analyze genomic data. Given the sensitivity of this data, security was critical to their mission. By partnering with Microsoft for security solutions like Microsoft 365 E5 and Microsoft Sentinel, SOPHiA GENETICS identified and minimized their security risks, enabling them to stay focused on delivering healthcare solutions through their SOPHiA AI platform.

Accelerate your innovation and maximize cloud value 

At Microsoft, we are committed to our customers’ success and ensuring they have the support they need throughout their cloud journey. We’ve accelerated innovation with purpose-built and AI-driven industry-specific solutions so you can realize value with Microsoft Azure faster. We’ve also built a trusted ecosystem of partners who are always innovating, so you can easily keep up with industry changes. With Azure’s seamless integration of applications and solutions pre-configured for your industry, you can trust that you’ll stay ahead in a competitive market.

Start innovating today

• Achieve cloud and AI success with Azure Essentials.
• Read the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Strategic Cloud Platform Services (SCPS).

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services, David Wright, Dennis Smith, 21 October 2024,

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Magic Quadrant  is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft. 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 or other designation. 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

The post Microsoft named a Leader in 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Strategic Cloud Platform Services appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog.