I am spending as much of my research time as possible on cloud these days, although my core coverage (colocation, hosting, and CDNs) still demands most of my client-facing time.

Reflecting the fact that hosting and cloud infrastructure services are part of the same broad market (if you’re buying service from Joyent or GoGrid or MediaTemple or the like, you’re buying hosting), the next Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Hosting will include cloud providers. That means I’m currently busy working on an awful lot of stuff, preparatory to beginning the formal process in January. I know we’ll be dealing with a lot of vendors who have never participated in a Magic Quadrant before, which should make this next iteration personally challenging but hopefully very interesting to our clients and exciting to vendors in the space.

Anyway, I have two new research notes out today:

Web Hosting and Cloud Infrastructure Prices, North America, 2008. This defines a segmentation for the emerging cloud infrastructure services market, and provides guidance to current pricing for the various category of Web hosting services, including cloud services.

Dataquest Insight: A Service Provider Road Map to the Cloud Infrastructure Transformation. This is a note targeted at hosting companies, carriers, IT outsourcers, and others who are in, or plan to enter, the hosting or cloud infrastructure services markets. It’s a practical guide to the evolving market, with a look at product and customer segmentation, the financial impacts, and the practicalities of evolving from traditional hosting to the cloud.

Gartner clients only for those notes, sorry.