The 20 Coolest Cloud Infrastructure Vendors Of The Cloud 100
Coolest Cloud Infrastructure Vendors For 2013
Amazon Web Services maintained its status in 2012 as the leading cloud infrastructure provider, cutting prices and adding features to its service.
But competition intensified throughout the year. Rackspace added public and private cloud services to its portfolio. The big tech vendors made serious plays to bring their existing customers and new ones into the cloud fold.
Telcos took the natural steps of leveraging their existing infrastructure to offer attractive cloud services, younger companies built new cloud infrastructure, and OpenStack became its own foundation and turned into a center point for scores of companies accessing the cloud.
Here we take a look at the coolest cloud infrastructure vendors to make this year's Cloud 100 list.
Amazon Web Services
CEO: Jeff Bezos
Amazon Web Services is working hard to maintain its leadership position with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure computing services. It has continued to cut prices, added high-capacity storage instances, introduced the Redshift data warehousing service, and made it easier for customers to shift their IT resources across the AWS network.
AT&T Cloud Services
Chairman, CEO: Randall Stephenson
AT&T is wisely leveraging its network backbone to create private cloud services for enterprises. In October, it entered into a partnership with IBM to offer an enterprise-class, private cloud service that includes IBM’s business-class SmartCloud platform and AT&T’s network.
BlueLock
CEO: Christopher Clapp
Bluelock targets the midsize and enterprise markets with a vCloud data center service for public and private cloud IaaS, with optional managed services. As a close VMware service provider partner, Bluelock is quick to deploy new VMware products and upgrades.
CA Technologies
CEO: Michael Gregoire
In the past two years, CA bought a score of cloud-focused companies and now offers infrastructure and platform services such as CA Private Cloud Accelerator for Vblock platforms, which has attracted top cloud MSPs such as GreenPages as partners.
Cisco Systems
Chairman, CEO: John Chambers
Networking giant Cisco is rapidly growing its CloudVerse framework of products such as Unified Computing System servers and Nexus switches for enterprises to build private, public and hybrid clouds, along with its Cloud Connect Solution to migrate business applications to the cloud.
Cloudscaling
CEO: Michael Grant
Cloudscaling evolved from building cloud platforms for service providers, governments and enterprises to launch its own cloud platform, called Open Cloud System, based on OpenStack code. It also adds services that enable interoperability with public clouds from Amazon Web Services and Google.
Dell
Chairman, CEO: Michael Dell
Although relatively new to the cloud, Dell provides a vCloud Datacenter Service for public cloud IaaS, along with a VMware-virtualized Dedicated Cloud offering. Dell leverages its hardware and its cloud offerings to provide lower costs for components powering its cloud services.
Eucalyptus Systems
CEO: Marten Mickos
Eucalyptus, the open-source software provider for building cloud infrastructure, in late 2012 updated its platform to make it easier for partners and businesses to create and manage their own private clouds. The Eucalyptus platform emphasizes self-service private cloud building.
GoGrid
Founder, Chairman, CEO: John Keagy
GoGrid is making noise as a small cloud IaaS-focused provider with a fixed-size, paid-by-the-VM, Xen-virtualized IaaS as a public cloud and private cloud. According to research firm Gartner, GoGrid is among the top five public cloud IaaS providers in the use of VMs.
Hewlett-Packard
CEO: Meg Whitman
HP entered the cloud infrastructure fray in 2012 with its Converged Cloud, tying together several cloud programs so businesses can use public, private and hybrid cloud services. HP has an advantage in being able to draw on its wide product portfolio and its customer and partner base.
IBM
Chairman, President, CEO: Ginni Rometty
IBM, always a leader in technology services, believes that its SmartCloud IaaS has an answer for almost any enterprise looking to the cloud, with connected security, networking, PaaS and business application management service at the ready as well.
Joyent
CEO: Henry Wasik
A smaller service provider, Joyent offers fixed-size, paid-by-the-VM public and private cloud IaaS and emphasizes application performance and network-based acceleration. Joyent7, released in November, is a fabric-based cloud infrastructure platform to support large enterprises and cloud services providers.
NaviSite
CEO: R. Brooks Borcherding
NaviSite, a Time Warner Cable company, provides enterprise-class hosting, managed applications and services. It says it addresses the complete technology stack—servers, network, storage, hardware, devices and applications—so IT managers can select the services needed for hosting requirements.
Nebula
Founder, CEO: Chris Kemp
Aided by $25 million in funding, Nebula continues to develop its hardware appliance that enables easy-to-deploy, large private cloud computing infrastructures. It uses its core OpenStack technology to allow hundreds of inexpensive computers in data centers to interoperate as cloud infrastructure.
OpenStack Foundation
Executive Director: Jonathan Bryce
OpenStack moved away from co-founders Rackspace and NASA to become an independent foundation, and its open-source, nonproprietary cloud technology development initiatives now influence major vendors such as IBM, HP, Cisco and 5,600 individual members from 87 countries and 850 different organizations.
Rackspace Hosting
CEO: Lanham Napier
Rackspace Hosting specializes in offerings related to the public cloud as well a private clouds and hybrids. The San Antonio, Texas-based company has evolved into a major cloud player that differentiates itself based on customer service, or, as the company terms it, "fanatical support."
Savvis
CEO: Jim Ousley
Savvis, owned by CenturyLink, is an established Web hoster, with a portfolio of public and private VMware-virtualized IaaS offerings with optional managed services under the Symphony brand. Its multitiered IaaS products address a wide range of enterprise cloud services.
Terremark
Chairman, CEO, Verizon: Lowell McAdam
Terremark, a Verizon company, gains by leveraging its parent company’s data center, cloud and security businesses, and its Enterprise Cloud service provides multiple VMware-virtualized offerings, including public, managed and public sector clouds. Enterprises can use Terremark’s service in a hybrid alignment.
Tier 3
Founder, CTO: Jared Wray
Tier 3 offers paid-by-the-VM, vCloud-powered public cloud IaaS from data centers as well as a Database-as-a-Service and has added management features called Cloud Server Group Management to help companies maintain large server environments as they move workloads to the cloud.
Virtustream
Chairman, CEO: Rodney Rogers
Virtustream offers a hypervisor-neutral, public and private IaaS on its xStream platform, with managed services optional. The company emphasizes a strong consultative approach, with expertise in SAP. Its cloud focuses on production applications, but it also targets traditional enterprise workloads.