Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, 2014, has just been released (see the client-only interactive version, or the free reprint). If you’re a Gartner client, you can also view the related charts, which summarize the offerings, features, and data center locations in a convenient table format. (The charts are unfortunately less readable than they could be, as our publication system doesn’t allow comments in Excel spreadsheets. Sorry.)

We’re continuing to update this Magic Quadrant every nine months, since the market is moving so quickly. There have been significant changes in vendor positions since the August 2013 Magic Quadrant (the free reprint has expired, but the graphic is floating around, and Gartner clients can use the “History” tab in the online Magic Quadrant tool, which allows you to compare 2012, 2013, and 2014 interactively).

We’ve observed, over the last nine months, a major shift in Gartner’s client base — the desire to make strategic bets on cloud IaaS providers. In general, this reduces the number of significant suppliers to an organization to just one or two (whereas many organizations had as many as four), with the overwhelming bulk of the workloads going to one provider. It also means that clients are interested in knowing not just who is winning right now, but who is going to be the winner in five or even ten years. That’s really the lens that this Magic Quadrant should be viewed through: Who has what it takes to convince the customer that they can serve both current needs and will sustain market leadership over the long term?

Our clients have, since September of 2013 (which seemed to mark a change in Microsoft’s go-to-market approach for Azure), consistently viewed this as an AWS vs. Microsoft battle, with AWS continuing to win the vast majority of business but Microsoft winning significant inroads, especially with later-adopter customers. In recent weeks since the big price drops, lots of clients have been asking about the future of Google, as well, and there are a lot of curiosity questions about IBM (SoftLayer) also, although the IBM questions tend to be more outsourcing and broader-strategy in orientation. Of course, prospects consider other vendors, especially their existing incumbent vendors, as well, but AWS and Microsoft are overwhelmingly the top contenders.

What’s interesting about this year’s Visionaries is that they all have new platforms — CenturyLink with the Tier 3 acquisition, CSC with the ServiceMesh acquisition coupled with the AWS partnership, Google with Google Compute Engine, IBM with the SoftLayer acquisition, and Verizon Terremark with the still-beta Verizon Cloud. (Arguably VMware falls into this bucket as well, despite being a Niche Player this year.) These providers are in the middle of reinventing themselves, most with the idea of battling it out for the #3 spot in the market.

This is not a market for the faint of heart. (I recently asked a large vendor if they intended to compete seriously in the IaaS space, and was told, “Only an idiot takes on Amazon, Microsoft, and Google simultaneously.”) For that matter, this is not a market for the shallow of pocket. You can’t spend your way to success here, but you need engineers, intellectual property, and to be a real #3, substantial capital investment in infrastructure.

There’s also a clear convergence with the PaaS market that’s taking place here. AWS has long offered an array of services that are PaaS elements, as well as many things that sit on the spectrum between pure IaaS and pure PaaS. Microsoft and Google started as PaaS providers and then launched IaaS offerings. The distintions will blur and increasingly become less relevant, as providers fight it out on features and capabilities.

Gartner continues to separate our evaluation of related managed and professional services from the core cloud IaaS platform, because we believe that clients are increasingly choosing a platform, and then choosing consultants and managed services providers (or alternatively, turning to a trusted integrator who helps them choose the right platforms for their needs). I’ll be writing on this more in the future, but keep an eye out for the upcoming regional Magic Quadrants for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting for a managed services-oriented view.