Gartner Group has issued its latest analysis of the Web hosting and cloud infrastructure services segments -- walking a fine line as it worked to bring into clearer focus what's often loosely, poorly defined or changing segments of IT:

No single vendor in this market does everything well. Moreover, while all vendors on this Magic Quadrant serve a global clientele, their data center footprints and locations vary significantly. As a result, it is important to match your use case with a vendor that excels in serving that particular type of need. Smaller providers may do one thing extraordinarily well, but not have a comprehensive set of services that lets them serve a broad array of use cases. More than ever before, it is crucial to look beyond the Magic Quadrant Leaders when selecting a vendor. The vendor that is perfect for your needs may be a Niche Player.

Got that? It's an informative report, and it describes each company's strengths and weaknesses in nice detail. But it still paints an overall picture of cloud computing that's foggy.

In the much-watched Magic Quadrant for "Web Hosting and Hosted Cloud System Infrastructure Services (On Demand)," companies that made Gartner's cut include IBM, Savvis, AT&T, Terremark and Rackspace. Rackspace had some problems recently, you might recall, with a severe outage that impacted customers. That makes one wonder how, if a company that is considered a Magic Quadrant cloud company can get jammed up with a big outage, cloud benchmarking will evolve over the next year.

Companies that Gartner said it considered, but rejected for the Magic Quadrant in this space: Google ("Google's App Engine offering is a cloud application infrastructure, not a cloud system infrastructure. It does not provide generic virtualized servers; it is a sandboxed, restricted application environment for Python or Java."); and Microsoft ("Microsoft's Azure Services Platform is a cloud application infrastructure, not a cloud system infrastructure.")

In this latest evaluation, Gartner added to its consideration Amazon.com (which qualified for the "Visionary" quadrant), and dropped from consideration Qwest, because it does not offer on-demand hosting.