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SoftLayer and the Gartner Magic Quadrant

SoftLayer has been positioned in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for "Web Hosting and Cloud Infrastructure Services (On-Demand)" released July 2, 2009, written by Gartner analysts Lydia Leong and Ted Chamberlain.

According to the Gartner report, "Web hosting is rapidly converging with cloud system infrastructure services. For the last several years, the market has been evolving toward on-demand infrastructure provisioned on a flexible, pay-as-you-go basis, but the introduction of cloud computing offerings has radically accelerated innovation in this market. The economic downturn has accelerated adoption of these offerings, thanks to the cost-savings that can be achieved by the move from physical to virtual services, and from purchasing for peak capacity to obtaining what you need only when you need it. The majority of hosting customers now obtain at least some of their infrastructure on-demand, and most new hosting contracts include on-demand services. This evolution has quickly changed the vendor landscape, bringing many new entrants to rapid prominence, as well as decreasing the relevance of hosters who have failed to make this shift."

Gartner based the 2009 evaluation on five use cases for hosting, all of which are made more cost-efficient by on-demand infrastructure. The use cases are:

Self-managed hosting, for cost-effective agile replacement of a traditional data center.
Mainstream managed hosting, for Web content and applications of low to moderate complexity.
Highly complex managed hosting, for rich Internet applications.
Global solutions portfolio, for a diversified set of interactive marketing needs.
Enterprise applications hosting, for infrastructure underlying complex applications such as SAP.

The SoftLayer Approach

Our approach since founding SoftLayer has been to give our customers complete control over their environments through a level of automation that is unheard of in the industry. Our record of innovation and thought leadership in our design includes multiple industry firsts: Private Network for managing servers; fully featured and integrated portal; standards oriented and fully featured API; and most recently a cloud offering that integrates with all SoftLayer services. At SoftLayer, we believe the secret to building an effective solution going forward is going to be the complete integration of multiple IT environments - both in-house and outsourced - through a common management console and provisioning system. To that end, we have launched a set of cloud services that include:

CDN
Storage
Computing

All of these are available as standalone services (i.e. no dedicated server required) as well as being fully integrated with all other SoftLayer offerings. SoftLayer offers hourly billing on our CloudLayer computing platform which is available across all SoftLayer data centers.

For more information about SoftLayer and the Magic Quadrant, see our recent press release.

About the Magic Quadrant

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted July 2, 2009 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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