As I alluded to in some earlier posts, we are doing a mid-year Magic Quadrant for public cloud IaaS. Specifically, this is for multi-tenant, on-demand, self-provisioned, compute services (with associated storage, networking, etc.). That would be services like Amazon EC2 and Terremark Enterprise Cloud. The intended context is virtual data center services — i.e., environments in which a business can run multiple applications of their choice — as they would be bought by Gartner’s typical IT buyer clients (mid-market, enterprise, and technology companies of all sizes).

Vendors invited to participate will see a formal research-initiation email sometime in the next week or two (or so I hope). This is just an early heads-up.

If you are a public cloud compute IaaS provider and you didn’t participate in the last Magic Quadrant (i.e., you did not do a survey for qualification last year), and you are interested in trying to qualify this year, please feel free to get in touch with me, and I’ll discuss including you in the qualification survey round. (Anyone who got a survey last time will get one this time.) You do not need to be a Gartner client.

Of late, I’ve seen some enthusiastic PR folks sign up executives at totally inappropriate companies to talk to me about qualifying for MQ inclusion. Please note that the MQ is for service providers, not enablers (i.e., not software or hardware companies who make stuff to build clouds with). Moreover, it is for public cloud (i.e., multi-tenant elastic services), not custom private clouds or utility hosting and certainly not colocation or data center outsourcing. And it is for the virtual data center services, the “computing” part of “cloud computing” — not cloud storage, PaaS, SaaS, or anything else.