Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, 2013, has just been released (see the client-only interactive version, or the free reprint). Gartner clients can also consult the related charts, which summarize the offerings, features, and data center locations.

We’re now updating this Magic Quadrant on a nine-month basis, and quite a bit has changed since the 2012 update (see the client-only 2012, or the free 2012 reprint).

In particular, market momentum has strongly favored Amazon Web Services. Many organizations have now had projects on AWS for several years, even if they hadn’t considered themselves to have “done anything serious” on AWS. Thus, as those organizations get serious about cloud computing, AWS is their incumbent provider — there are relatively few truly greenfield opportunities in cloud IaaS now. Many Gartner clients now actually have multiple incumbent providers (the most common combination is AWS and Terremark), but nearly all such customers tell us that the balance of new projects are going to AWS, not the other providers.

Little by little, AWS has systematically addressed the barriers to “mainstream”, enterprise adoption. While it’s still far from everything that it could be, and it has some specific and significant weaknesses, that steady improvement over the last couple of years has brought it to the “good enough” point. While we saw much stronger momentum for AWS than other providers in 2012, 2013 has really been a tipping point. We still hear plenty of interest in competitors, but AWS is overwhelmingly the dominant vendor.

At the same time, many vendors have developed relatively solid core offerings. That means that the number of differentiators in the market has decreased, as many features become common “table stakes” features that everyone has. It means that most offerings from major vendors are now fairly decent, but only a few are really stand out for their capabilities.

That leads to an unusual Magic Quadrant, in which the relative strength of AWS in both Vision and Execution essentially forces the whole quadrant graphic to rescale. (To build an MQ, analysts score providers relative to each other, on all of the formal evaluation criteria, and the MQ tool automatically plots the graphic; there is no manual adjustment of placements.) That leaves you with centralized compression of all of the other vendors, with AWS hanging out in the upper right-hand corner.

Note that a Magic Quadrant is an evaluation of a vendor in the market; the actually offering itself is only a portion of the overall score. I’ll be publishing a Critical Capabilities research note in the near future that evaluates one specific public cloud IaaS offering from each of these vendors, against its suitability for a set of specific use cases. My colleagues Kyle Hilgendorf and Chris Gaun have also been publishing extremely detailed technical evaluations of individual offerings — AWS, Rackspace, and Azure, so far.

A Magic Quadrant is a tremendous amount of work — for the vendors as well as for the analyst team (and our extended community of peers within Gartner, who review and comment on our findings). Thanks to everyone involved. I know this year’s placements came as disappointments to many vendors, despite the tremendous hard work that they put into their offerings and business in this past year, but I think the new MQ iteration reflects the cold reality of a market that is highly competitive and is becoming even more so.