Google

Strengths: Google has become far more aggressive in pursuing enterprise customers looking for a cloud to host traditional workloads and IT processes, according to Gartner.

"Google's ability to sell to a broad range of customers has improved significantly over the past year  --  a visible impact from recent deeper investments in GCP," the research firm said.

Gartner has noticed customers choosing GCP as a secondary, rather than strategic, provider. But companies that compete with Amazon seem to increasingly look to Google as a strategic alternative to the cloud leader.

Cautions: Google is still trying to achieve feature-parity with competitors to compliment its strong core capabilities, according to Gartner.

"Google is introducing more capabilities and partnerships that are important to enterprise customers," but until recently had been mostly focused on cloud-native applications and DevOps-style operations, not legacy workloads, the research firm said.

Google only recently began building a strong channel, and still has few MSP and professional services partners. That "significantly heightens the challenges of adopting GCP," Gartner said.

Google is also busy recruiting partners to build management tools.