It’s that time of the year again, a little bit early — we’re trying to refresh the Cloud IaaS Magic Quadrant on a nine-month cycle rather than a yearly cycle, reflecting the faster pace of the market.

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

If you are a cloud IaaS provider, and you did not receive the 2012 survey, and you would like to receive the 2013 survey, please email Michele dot Severance at Gartner dot com to request to be added to the contact list. You must be authorized to speak for your company. Please note we cannot work with PR firms for the Magic Quadrant; if you are a PR agency and you think that your client should be participating, you should get in touch with your client and have your client contact Michele.

If you did receive the 2012 survey, you should be receiving email from Michele within the next few days, requesting that you confirm that you’re the right contact or passing it on to the correct contact to do so.

If you’re unsure whether you’re a cloud IaaS provider by this MQ’s definitions, consider the following:

• Are you selling a service? (That means you’re not selling hardware or software.)
• Are you offering compute, storage, and network resources? (You can’t be, say, just a cloud storage provider.)
• Is your offering fully standardized? (It’s identical for every customer, not a reference architecture that you customize.)
• Can customers self-service? (Once approved as customers, they can go to your portal and push buttons to immediately, with zero human intervention, obtain/destroy/configure/manage their infrastructure resources. Managed services can be optional.)
• Can you meter by the hour? (You can either sell by the hour, or you can offer monthly capacity where usage is metered hourly. Having to take a VM for a full month is hosting, not IaaS.)
• Do you have at least one multi-tenant cloud IaaS offering? (Customers must share a capacity pool for the offering to be considered multi-tenant.)
• Do you consider your competition to be offerings such as Amazon EC2, Verizon Terremark’s Enterprise Cloud, or CSC’s CloudCompute? (If not, you’re probaly confused about what cloud IaaS is.)

The best guide to this year’s Magic Quadrant is last year’s Magic Quadrant. Read the interactive MQ if you’re a client, or the free reprint if you’re not.

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 theyâre not obviously wrong fits, like software companies without an IaaS offering).

The status for this Magic Quadrant will be periodically updated on its status page.