The Web hosting Magic Quadrant is currently in editing, the culmination of a six-month process (despite my strenuous efforts to keep it to four months). Many, many client conversations, reference calls, and vendor discussions later, we arrive at the demonstration of a constant challenge: the user tendency to misinterpret the Magic Quadrant, and the correlating vendor tendency to become obsessive about which quadrant they’re placed in.

Even though Gartner has an extensive explanation of the Magic Quadrant methodology on our website, vendors and users alike tend to oversimplify what it means. So a complex methodology ends up translating down to something like this:

But the MQ isn’t intended to be used this way. Just because a vendor isn’t listed as a Leader doesn’t mean that they suck. It doesn’t mean that they don’t have enterprise clients, that those clients don’t like them, that their product sucks, that they don’t routinely beat out Leaders for business, or, most importantly, that we wouldn’t recommend them or that you shouldn’t use them.

The MQ reflects the overall position of a vendor within an entire market. An MQ leader tends to do well at a broad selection of products/services within that market, but is not necessarily the best at any particular product/service within that market. And even the vendor who is typically best at something might not be the right vendor for you, especially if your profile or use case deviates significantly from the “typical”.

I recognize, of course, that one of the reasons that people look at visual tools like the MQ is that they want to rapidly cull down the number of vendors in the market, in order to make a short-list. I’m not naive about the fact that users will say things like, “We will only use Leaders” or “We won’t use a Niche Player”. However, this is explicitly what the MQ is not designed to do. It’s incredibly important to match your needs to what a vendor is good at, and you have to read the text of the MQ in order to understand that. Also, there may be vendors who are too small or too need-specific to have qualified to be on the MQ, who shouldn’t be overlooked.

Also, an MQ reflects only a tiny percentage of what an analyst actually knows about the vendor. Its beauty is that it reduces a ton of quantified specific ratings (nearly 5 dozen, in the case of my upcoming MQ) to a point on a graph, and a pile of qualitative data to somewhere between six and ten one-or-two-sentence bullet points about a vendor. It’s convenient reference material that’s produced by an exhaustive (and exhausting) process, but it’s not necessarily the best medium for expressing an analyst’s nuanced opinions about a vendor.

I say this in advance of the Web hosting MQ’s release: In general, the greater the breadth of your needs, or the more mainstream they are, the more likely it is that an MQ’s ratings are going to reflect your evaluation of the vendors. Vendors who specialize in just a single use case, like most of the emerging cloud vendors, have market placements that reflect that specialization, although they may serve that specific use case better than vendors who have broader product portfolios.

My colleague Ted Chamberlin and I are currently finalizing the new Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Hosting. This year, we’ve nearly doubled the number of providers on the MQ, adding a bunch of cloud providers who offer hosting services (i.e., providers who are cloud system infrastructure service providers, and who aren’t pure storage or backup).

The draft has gone out for vendor review, and these last few days have been occupied by more than a dozen conversations with vendors about where they’ve placed in the MQ. (No matter what, most vendors are convinced they should be further right and further up.) Over the course of these conversations, one clear pattern seems to be characterizing this year: We’re seeing lots of data presented in the feedback process that wasn’t presented as part of the MQ briefing or any previous briefing the vendor did with us.

I recognize the MQ can be a mysterious process to vendors. So here’s a couple of thoughts from the analyst side on what makes for effective MQ briefing content. These are by no means universal opinions, but may be shared by my colleagues who cover service businesses.

In brief, the execution axis is about what you’re doing now. The vision axis is about where you’re going. A set of definitions for the criteria on each axis are included with every vendor notification that begins the Magic Quadrant process. If you’re a vendor being considered for an MQ, you really want to read the criteria. We do not throw darts to determine vendor placement. Every vendor gets a numerical rating on every single one of those criteria, and a tool plots the dots. It’s a good idea to address each of those criteria in your briefing (or supplemental material, if you can’t fit in everything you need into the briefing).

We generally have reasonably good visibility into execution from our client base, but the less market presence you have, especially among Gartner’s typical client base (mid-size business to large enterprise, and tech companies), the less we’ve probably seen you in deals or have gotten feedback from your customers. Similarly, if you don’t have much in the way of a channel, there’s less of a chance any of your partners have talked to us about what they’re doing with you. Thus, your best use of briefing time for an MQ is to fill us in on what we don’t know about your company’s achievements — the things that aren’t readily culled from publicly-available information or talking to prospects, customers, and partners.

It’s useful to briefly summarize your company’s achievements over the last year — revenue growth, metrics showing improvements in various parts of the business, new product introductions, interesting customer wins, and so forth. Focus on the key trends of your business. Tell us what strategic initiatives you’ve undertaken and the ways they’ve contributed to your business. You can use this to help give us context to the things we’ve observed about you. We may, for instance, have observed that your customer service seems to have improved, but not know what specific measures you took to improve it. Telling us also helps us to judge how far along the curve you are with an initiative, which in turn helps us to advise our clients better and more accurately rate you.

Vision, on the other hand, is something that only you can really tell us about. Because this is where you’re going, rather than where you are now or where you’ve been, the amount of information you’re willing to disclose is likely to directly correlate to our judgement of your vision. A one-year, quarter-by-quarter roadmap is usually the best way to show us what you’re thinking; a two-year roadmap is even better. (Note that we do rate track record, so you don’t want to claim things that you aren’t going to deliver — you’ll essentially take a penalty next year if you failed to deliver on the roadmap.) We want to know what you think of the market and your place in it, but the very best way to demonstrate that you’re planning to do something exciting and different is to tell us what you’re expecting to do. (We can keep the specifics under NDA, although the more we can talk about publicly, the more we can tell our clients that if they choose you, there’ll be some really cool stuff you’ll be doing for them soon.) If you don’t disclose your initiatives, we’re forced to guess based on your general statements of direction, and generally we’re going to be conservative in our guesses, which probably means a lower rating than you might otherwise have been able to get.

The key thing to remember, though, is that if at all possible, an MQ briefing should be a summary and refresher, not an attempt to cram a year’s worth of information into an hour. If you’ve been doing routine briefings covering product updates and the launch of key initiatives, you can skip all that in an MQ briefing, and focus on presenting the metrics and key achievements that show what you’ve done, and the roadmap that shows where you’re going. Note that you don’t have to be a client in order to conduct briefings. If MQ placement or analyst recommendations are important to your business, keep in mind that when you keep an analyst well-informed, you reap the benefit the whole year ’round in the hundreds or even thousands of conversations analysts have with your prospective customers, not just on the MQ itself.