IBM is leading the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market preferences by the U.S.-based enterprises, ahead of Amazon, Google, Cisco, HP and Microsoft, said IDC.
IDC said while US enterprises have ranked IBM the #1 cloud computing provider, Cisco in second position, HP in third rank, AT&T 4th, Google 5th, Microsoft 6th and Amazon received 7th rankings.
The rankings are based on responses from more than 400 US-based companies with more than 1,000 employees, said IBM.
Cloud providers were also rated on their quality of service for availability, speed of provisioning, simplicity and overall cost.
The study said IBM, Cisco, HP, AT&T, and Google are the likely most effective top 5 providers in delivering IaaS.
Enterprises have selected IBM as their top overall preference among providers they believe can most effectively provide IaaS, whether private or public. IBM is the top cloud vendor with 35 percent of first place votes against Amazon with 13 percent, Microsoft and Google came in around 16 percent.
IBM was also rated the leader in six of eight major industries covered in the study including Financial Services, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Professional Services, Wholesale and Retail and Public Sector (government).
The IDC report said IBM also finished in the top three in Transportation and Telecommunications, the only vendor to lead in as many industries and rank no lower than third in any industry.
52 percent enterprises said a strong preference for full-service providers such as IBM for their broad capabilities — professional services, consulting systems integration, custom software development and testing — needed to support buyers moving to cloud services. Less than 5 percent of respondents preferred their vendor to be an online service provider such as Amazon or Google.
Overall, US buyers gave cloud service providers considerably strong ratings, according to the IDC study. This applies to providing cloud services most cost-effectively and meeting quality of service expectations involving availability, speed of provisioning, and simplicity of service provisioning.
The report said players competing in the cloud services market will need to build to the end-state structure of a cloud service provider business model that resembles the automotive factory model of services delivery involving a robust ecosystem, localized app store, integrated digital services supply chain and a cloud factory consisting of PaaS, TaaS, IaaS and SaaS.
Meanwhile, IBM said its Strategy and Analytics Business Consulting practice has been named a leader in the new IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Business Analytics Consulting and Systems Integration Services 2014 Vendor Assessment report.
The IDC MarketScape study evaluated the top business analytics providers across a variety of key success factors, including talent management, life cycle of business analytics services, portfolio strength and vendor strategies.
