Introduction:

Recently, Gartner officially released the Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure report, with 10 vendors recognized worldwide. Alibaba Cloud has been positioned into the Niche Players Quadrant and has achieved the highest position for 'Ability to Execute' and the furthest position for 'Completeness of Vision' among all Asia-Pacific vendors.

In Gartner’s critical capabilities assessment, Alibaba Cloud maintained high scores in both 'Container Deployment' and 'AI and GenAI Workloads,' ranking among the top tier of all evaluated vendors. The achievements underscore Alibaba Cloud’s substantial investment in open-source large models and AI development platforms, as well as the significant outcomes delivered by its industry-specific models within hybrid cloud environments.

Gartner defines distributed hybrid infrastructure (DHI) are solutions incorporating cloud-native infrastructure principles (e.g., programmability, elasticity, modularity and resiliency). DHI can be deployed and managed, delivering cloud services wherever the customer chooses, including on-premises, at the colocation, at the edge or in the public cloud. This flexibility sets DHI apart from traditional public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which typically relies on a centralized approach. Vendors fall into three categories, with distinct strategies: cloud platform providers, full stack hyperconverged vendors and software infrastructure platform providers. Their offerings include software and/or integrated hardware with a unified management and control plane.

Source:
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure, 8 September 2025
Critical Capabilities for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure, 16 September 2025

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