At the risk of seeming like I'm jumping on the bandwagon, and amid much flak from the community over its apparently misguided Magic Quadrant for Cloud IaaS and Web Hosting Providers (link to GoGrid's website), I can't say that I fully agreed with Gartner's assessment of where they positioned Amazon.
That said, Lydia Leong, Research VP at Gartner, did post a rebuttal of sorts to whatever criticism Gartner received. In her post, Leong makes the case that the MQ was for IaaS AND web hosting providers which is why Amazon was placed in the visionaries quadrant. This logic, by itself, was enough to satisfy me that the MQ was basically correct.
But, then I started thinking that Gartner missed the mark on the subject of the MQ: IaaS can be considered as a form of web hosting, but it's a stretch. IaaS and web hosting as fundamentally different in that the former is a service that is rapidly available on demand (among other characteristics published in the NIST definition) while the latter is an engagement that requires managed services and is billed on a monthly basis.
Enter Leong again who wrote that Gartner was preparing to publish a mid-year version of the MQ only, this time, it was going to be cloud only. This seems to indicate that Gartner made the same logical leaps I did and is now committed to providing a more accurate layout of the competitive landscape for IaaS. The one lingering doubt I have is how Leong framed it:
"The mid-year version will be cloud-only, specifically the self-provisioned “virtual data center” segment of the market."
I'm not quite sure about how Gartner is defining "self-provisioned 'virtual data center'" and how they will rank the contributing organizations.
Despite this, I am am very curious to know how it turns out and look forward to reading it through. If anyone from Gartner reads this and would like to send me a copy, I'd be more than happy to read it through and post my thoughts. ;)
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