(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — IT research group Gartner Inc. (www.gartner.com) announced last week that it had published its “Magic Quadrant for Web Hosting and Hosted Cloud System Infrastructure Services (On Demand)” report, according to a blog post made Thursday, by Lydia Leong, one of the report’s authors.
As tends to follow the release of a report of this kind, press releases began rolling in this week from hosting providers announcing their inclusion or positioning in the report. Terremark (www.terremark.com) issued an announcement Monday morning, for instance, that it had been included in the “leaders’ quadrant.”
The actual content of the report is being issued privately to paying Garter subscribers (of which the WHIR is not one), but we’ll update this article as we receive notice of any other relevant hosting providers’ inclusion.
UPDATE: On Tuesday, July 7, web hosting provider SoftLayer (www.softlayer.com) announced that it had been listed in the magic quadrant, among the “niche players” quadrant. And on Thursday, July 9, IT infrastructure firm SAVVIS (www.savvis.com) said it had been placed in the “leaders” quadrant. And on Monday, July 11, GoGrid (www.gogrid.com) reported that it had been included in the “visionaries” quadrant. On July 14, Layered Tech (www.layeredtech.com) said it had been included in the study, though it didn’t specify which quadrant.
“It marks the first time we’ve done a formal vendor rating of many of the cloud system infrastructure service providers,” writes Leong. “We do so in the context of the Web hosting market, though, which means that the providers are evaluated on the full breadth of the five most common hosting use cases that Gartner clients have.”
The use case that describes Terremark’s Enterprise Cloud (as well as Amazon EC2, GoGrid and others), according to Leong, is “self-managed hosting,” though she doesn’t describe any others in the blog post.
The bulk of the blog post is used to offer further insight into the methodology that created some of the results. For instance, inclusion was based largely on revenue, so certain vendors may have been left out of the report if they hadn’t, as of the January cut-off date had a cloud computing service or a high enough revenue to merit inclusion.
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant reports are divided into four pieces, with Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players making up the quadrants. Vendors are scored according to “completeness of vision” and “ability to execute.”
“Some people might look at the vendors on this MQ and wonder why exciting new entrants aren’t highly rated on vision and/or execution,” writes Leong. “Simply put, many of these vendors might be superb at what they do, yet still not rate very highly in the overall market represented by the MQ, because they are good at just one of the five use cases encompassed by the MQ’s market definition, or even good at just one particular aspect of a single use case.”
The blog post offers links to several other articles for advice on how to interpret and use the results of studies like this one.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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