We began the call-for-vendors process for Gartner’s 2014 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, as well as the regional Magic Quadrants for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting, in December. (See Doug Toombs’s call for vendors for the latter.)

The pre-qualification survey, which is intended to gather quantitative metrics and information about each provider’s service, is going out imminently. We sent out contact confirmations on December 26th to all service providers who are currently on our list to receive the survey. If you haven’t received a contact confirmation and you want to receive the survey, please contact Michele Severance (Michele dot Severance at Gartner dot com), who is providing administrative support for this Magic Quadrant. 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.

This year, we are doing an integrated survey process for multiple Magic Quadrants. The cloud IaaS MQ is, in many ways, foundational. Cloud-enabled managed hosting is the delivery of managed services on top of cloud IaaS and, more broadly, cloud-enabled system infrastructure. Consequently, this year’s survey asks about your platforms, your managed services levels, and how those things combine into service offerings. Because the survey is longer, we’re starting the survey process earlier than usual.

The survey is an important part of our data collection efforts on the markets, not just for the Magic Quadrants. We use the survey data to recommend providers throughout the year, particularly since we try to find providers that can exactly fit a client’s needs — including small niche providers. Far from everything fits into the one-size-fits-all mold of the largest providers.

The Cloud IaaS MQ continues to be updated on a 9-month cycle, reflecting the continued fast pace of the market. It will have similar scope to last year, with a very strong emphasis on self-service capabilities.

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.