Gartner will soon be starting the process of updating our Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting, currently targeted for publication in Q1 of 2013. This is the update to the Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting that was published in March 2012 of this year; a free reprint is available. If you consider yourself to be an enterprise-class managed hosting provider, capable of providing fully-managed services for complex, mission-critical websites, this is your Magic Quadrant. (Note that this is a distinct market from data center outsourcing.)

The previous Magic Quadrant was global. However, because regional requirements differ, and many excellent managed hosting providers are not global, we have decided to replace the global Magic Quadrant with three regional Magic Quadrants — one each for North America, Pan-Europe, and Asia-Pacific, published in that order. Each MQ will have its own inclusion criteria and evaluation criteria.

I will be leading the overall global effort, and Gartner’s analysts that cover Managed Hosting will be doing these MQs as a global team, although each regional MQ will have a region-specific lead author. We are going to do a single global data collection effort and set of briefings, though, to reduce the level of effort needed by the service provider AR teams.

Doug Toombs will be the lead author for the North American MQ and will be assisting me in running the global effort. If you are not already following his blog or his Twitter (@DougToombs), I strongly encourage you to do so.

We will imminently be kicking off the process for this set of MQs. If you were not on last year’s Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting, and you would like to receive a pre-qualification survey, please contact Doug Toombs at Douglas dot Toombs at Gartner dot com. Please note that we allow any service provider to participate in the survey process; reception of a survey does not indicate in any way that we feel that your company is qualified to be in the MQ.