Some @charlesfitz reactions to the long-delayed Gartner Infrastructure as a Service Magic Quadrant plus bonus material:
1/ Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant is finally out – probably the most important assessment of the cloud market.
2/ I yield to no one in making fun of Gartner but they do a really good job on this one.
3\ MQ about what you’d expect – AWS followed by Azure in the Leaders quadrant. Microsoft looks like has closed the execution gap a little.
4\ Google now the only company in the Visionaries quadrant but have lost a little ground on visionary axis.
5\ IBM, CenturyLink and VMware have dropped out of the Visionaries quadrant. Gap between leaders and everyone else getting bigger.
6\ Overall the field drops from 15 last year to 10 (and bet even smaller next year)
7\ Biggest takeaway is MQ is deathblow for IBM and Oracle and their claims to be significant cloud vendors, much less somehow leaders.
8\ Oracle not listed at all, in spite of all their oratory about being in the IaaS business. Game over for them. Shades of HP a year ago.
9/ IBM sees huge decline in both vision and ability to execute. Relegated to the also-ran quadrant. Game over.
10\ Needless to say, no customer base cares more about Gartner’s perspective than IBM’s customer base. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
11\ The MQ is over two months late and rumor is the delay is due to IBM escalating, begging, cajoling, threatening, etc. Gartner.
12\ More later after I read the whole report.
Bonus:
See an updated timelapse of how the MQ has evolved over the past six years.
And an update of our previous geographic analysis of the MQ:
Cloud City now claims the Leader and Visionary quadrants as well as the most forward looking part of the Niche quadrant. Must confess to being a little surprised that much-touted “technology” powerhouses Los Angeles and New York City are not represented here 
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