(NOTE: This story was originally posted to CRN.com June 19.)

The Latest Look At The IaaS Field

The global public Infrastructure-as-a-Service market has both grown rapidly in recent years and seen the number of prominent vendors in the space decrease.

That dynamic was reflected in the past few Gartner Magic Quadrants for IaaS, which saw the research company consistently shed vendors from its eagerly anticipated rankings. But Gartner's 2017 report, released last week, bucked that trend, evaluating four more companies than the previous year's.

Two of those newcomers -- Interoute and Joyent -- made comebacks to the list after having fallen off in 2016. And two others -- Alibaba Cloud and Oracle -- are new players that have the technical talent, funding and market reach to make their presence felt in the market.

The only vendor dropped in 2017 from the previous year's Magic Quadrant was VMware, which recently sold off the remnants of its vCloud Air public cloud to European provider OVH.

While several companies made moves, the Leaders Quadrant in the 2017 report once again only contained two companies -- dominant industry kingpin Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure. Google just came up short from busting into that category.