Alibaba Cloud

Strengths: Parent company Alibaba Group has the financial means to keep investing in expansion, engineering, sales and marketing efforts. The cloud already offers a diverse set of capabilities comparable to hyper-scale giants, and is building out global data centers.

Alibaba has built "an impressive ecosystem" in China of managed services providers and ISVs, and is beginning to attract global partners, Gartner said.

There's the potential to become an alternative to global cloud giants in some regions based on the combination of integrated IaaS and PaaS with a private cloud stack.

Cautions: The international Alibaba Cloud was only launched in 2016, and there's a limited track record, according to Gartner. That particular product, less developed than the Chinese version, does little to differentiate itself.

"Alibaba Cloud's vision seems inextricably tied to that of its global competitors," Gartner noted. "It takes liberal inspiration from competitors when developing service capabilities and branding."