Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure
Heads of I&O are seeking a unified experience across public and private cloud, as well as edge deployments. The DHI market aims to reduce operational complexity and prove a unified cloud-to-edge management and control plane to simplify workload management and ensure policy enforcement.
Market Definition
Distributed hybrid infrastructure (DHI) are solutions incorporating cloud-native infrastructure principles (e.g., programmability, elasticity, modularity and resiliency). DHI can be deployed and managed, delivering cloud services wherever the customer chooses, including on-premises, at the colocation, at the edge or in the public cloud. This flexibility sets DHI apart from traditional public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which typically relies on a centralized approach. Vendors fall into three categories, with distinct strategies: cloud platform providers, full stack hyperconverged vendors and software infrastructure platform providers. Their offerings include software and/or integrated hardware with a unified management and control plane.
DHI serves as the foundation for deploying applications in a distributed manner, while maintaining a cloud-native or cloud-inspired approach. This approach enhances agility and flexibility for workloads that require deployment beyond the public cloud infrastructure and addresses potential limitations of traditional on-premises setups. DHI offers greater consistency, flexibility, mobility, isolation and availability across customer environments.
Enterprises can benefit from the principles of cloud computing, while retaining the ability to deploy resources whenever and wherever they are needed, and provide options to address workload specific characteristics, such as latency, performance and data sovereignty. Infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders targeting this market typically have strong hybrid needs and do not necessarily adhere to a cloud-only or cloud-first strategy, often maintaining substantial on-premises deployments. This strategic approach enables enterprises to harness the advantages of both environments, offering the flexibility needed to standardize and optimize operations, uphold performance and availability service-level agreements (SLAs), and support a variety of workloads.
Report 2025
Here is a summary of the vendors featured in the Gartner magic quadrant 2025 report.
For the full analysis and detailed insights, you can read the report
here
and view the magic quadrant graphic
here.
| Market Status | Market Vendor |
|---|---|
Leader |
Amazon Web Services |
Leader |
Broadcom (VMWare) |
Leader |
Microsoft |
Leader |
Nutanix |
Leader |
Oracle |
Visionary |
|
Niche Player |
Alibaba Cloud |
Niche Player |
Huawei |
Niche Player |
Tencent Cloud |
Challenger |
IBM |
Report 2024
Here is a summary of the vendors featured in the Gartner magic quadrant 2024 report.
For the full analysis and detailed insights, you can read the report
here
and view the magic quadrant graphic
here.
| Market Status | Market Vendor |
|---|---|
Leader |
Microsoft |
Leader |
Amazon Web Services |
Leader |
Nutanix |
Leader |
Broadcom (VMWare) |
Leader |
Oracle |
Visionary |
IBM |
Niche Player |
Alibaba Cloud |
Niche Player |
Huawei |
Niche Player |
Tencent Cloud |