We’re about to kick off Gartner’s 2012 Cloud IaaS Magic Quadrant.

A pre-qualification survey, intended to gather quantitative metrics and basic information about each provider’s service, will be going out very soon.

If you are a cloud compute IaaS provider — that means you offer, as a service, fully-automated, self-service compute, storage, and network infrastructure that is available on-demand (think “by the hour” and not “by the month”) — you did not receive a survey last year, and you would like to receive a survey this year, please contact me via email at Lydia dot Leong at Gartner dot com.

Note: This is not hosting and this is not data center outsourcing. You should have a fully-standardized offering — one that is identical for every customer, not a reference architecture that you customize — and customers should be self-servicing (i.e., they go to your portal and push buttons to immediately, with zero human intervention, obtain/destroy/configure/manage their infrastructure), although you can optionally provide managed services.

Also note: This is not for software or hardware vendors. This is for service providers.

Bottom line: If you don’t consider yourself to be in competition with Amazon EC2 or the Terremark Enterprise Cloud, to take two well-known examples, this is not your Magic Quadrant.

Please note that receiving a survey does not in any way indicate that we believe that your company is likely to qualify; we simply allow surveys to go to all interested parties (assuming that they’re not obviously wrong fits, like software companies without an IaaS offering).