We’re about to start the process for the next Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure Services and Web Hosting, along with the Critical Capabilities for Cloud Infrastructure Services (titles tentative and very much subject to change). Our hope is to publish in late July. These documents are typically a multi-month ordeal of vendor cat-herding; the evaluations themselves tend to be pretty quick, but getting all the briefings scheduled, references called, and paperwork done tends to eat up an inordinate amount of time. (This time, I’ve begged one of our admin assistants for help.)

What’s the difference? The MQ positions vendors in an overall broad market. CC, on the other hand, rates individual vendor products on how well they meet the requirements for a set of defined use cases. You get use-case by use-case ratings, which means that this year we’ll be doing things like “how well do these specific self-managed cloud offerings support a particular type of test-and-development environment need”. The MQ tends to favor vendors who do a broad set of things well; a CC rating, on the other hand, is essentially a narrow, specific evaluation based on specific requirements, and a product’s current ability to meet those needs (and therefore tends to favor vendors that have great product features).

Also, we’ve decided the CC note is going to be strictly focused on self-managed cloud — Amazon EC2 and its competitors, Terremark Enterprise Cloud and its competitors, and so on. This is a fairly pure features-and-functionality thing, in other words.

Anyone thinking about participation should check out my past posts on Magic Quadrants.