I’m not usually big on Gartner’s crystal-ball-gazing Magic Quadrant methodology – some people claim it’s pay-for-play writ large. I don’t know about that, it just seems to be a somewhat hokey, albeit scientifically-based, prediction of what might occur or, more often, hat already is.
Anyway – with that said, the latest IaaS MQ is pretty interesting viewing:
Random thoughts, in no real order:
- Congrats to my buddies at Tier 3 – a little player being seen to punch above its weight (and doing awesome stuff with PaaS at the same time)
- AWS up and to the right – that’s one positioning that is very hard to argue with
- Dell? Dell? What the hell are you doing – you and your buddies at Fujitsu better do something big, and fast (whatever DID happen to Fujitsu and private Azure)
- There’s a lot of folks hanging around the middle there – something has to happen to create some differentiation sometime soon

Related articles
- Gartner Announces 2012 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (forbes.com)
- Variations on Hype Quadrants.. no Magic Hype… no, Hype Cycle.. or is it Magic Quadrant? (cloudave.com)
- The 2012 Social CRM Tragic Quadrant (enterpriseirregulars.com)

(Cross-posted @ The Diversity Blog – SaaS, Cloud & Business Strategy)
Good points. It is also interesting see a cloud provider on it one year and then gone the next. Notable companies not on the 2012 report – DataPipe, Verizon Business and Sungard.