The Critical Capabilities for Public Cloud IaaS, 2016 has now been published. The Critical Capabilities is a technical assessment of public cloud IaaS offerings against a set of use cases — cloud-native applications, general business applications, application development environments, batch computing, and (new for 2016) the Internet of Things. It’s part of our integrated series of cloud IaaS assessments and complements our Magic Quadrant for Cloud IaaS (Gartner clients: see interactive version).

We are now launching right back into the Magic Quadrant cycle for 2017, with the goal of publishing a new Magic Quadrant in April 2017, and a new Critical Capabilities shortly thereafter.

A lot has happened since the early-2016 research process for our 2016 Magic Quadrant and Critical Capabilities cycle for this market. Multiple providers have launched new offerings and are phasing out their previous offerings, and there are some important new market entrants. We want to make sure that our research notes offer current representations of provider capabilities. (Usefully, a shift to April publication also gets us back to a schedule that aligns with our infrastructure & operations conference season.)

In previous years, we’ve issued an open invitation for the pre-qualification survey to all cloud IaaS providers. This year, we are not doing so; instead, we have issued invitations only to providers who we believe are highly likely to qualify.

If you are a cloud IaaS provider that did not receive an invitation, but you believe you are highly likely to qualify for inclusion, please email me at Lydia dot Leong at Gartner dot com to discuss it.