The 20 Coolest Cloud Platform Vendors Of The Cloud 100

Coolest Cloud Platforms For 2013

Building platforms to handle cloud services has become a booming market.

Infrastructure providers continue to forge ahead building data highways to the cloud, but creating platforms to manage and transfer IT workloads as they head to the cloud is a complex task. A number of new companies are rushing to fill that void.

Here we take a look at the coolest cloud platform vendors to make this year's Cloud 100 list.

AnyPresence

Co-Founder, CEO: Anirban "AC" Chakrabarti

AnyPresence’s cloud-based mobile platform for enterprises seeks to cut costs and make it easier to develop and deploy applications. It lets users assemble and deploy HTML5, native iOS and Android apps without installing software and offers mobile app templates and integration capabilities to facilitate deployment of mobile projects

AppFog

Founder, CEO: Lucas Carlson

AppFog is a leading PaaS provider of PHP, Ruby, Node.js and Java programming languages used by developers to deploy applications. AppFog delivers a reliable, scalable and fast platform for deploying applications in the cloud on Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft, HP and others.

Apprenda

Co-Founder, CEO: Sinclair Schuller

Apprenda is a serious PaaS player with a platform that lets businesses leverage their infrastructure to build a self-service cloud application platform. Its open PaaS stack support for .Net lets businesses manage their Windows-based applications on any infrastructure. The company also recently added support for Java.

CloudBees

Founder, CEO: Sacha Labourey

CloudBees’ platform gives users the means to quickly and easily build, deploy and manage Java applications in the cloud. The company’s Java PaaS targets businesses and ISVs, providing application life-cycle coverage from development to production.

Cloudera

CEO: Mike Olson

With its platform for big data, Cloudera is bringing to enterprises Apache Hadoop, the open-source software framework that supports the data-intensive applications that are essential for cloud computing. The company scored $65 million in venture funding in December.

Cloud Foundry

CEO: Paul Maritz

The Cloud Foundry platform from VMware is designed to be used by developers to build applications that can work across different clouds to allow choice and prevent vendor lock-in. Cloud Foundry is being developed as an open-source project and as a commercial endeavor.

Cumulogic

President, CEO: Mike Soby

Cumulogic enables enterprises, ISVs, and cloud providers to build and manage a PaaS on public, private and hybrid clouds. Its Cloud Application Platform v1.0 lets service providers use a cloud platform to deploy Java apps and includes enterprise application management features.

Engine Yard

CEO: John Dillon

Engine Yard’s PaaS platform, which supports the programming languages Ruby, PHP and Node.js, automates cloud configuration and deployment, allowing developers to build and manage cloud applications. Oracle partnered with Engine Yard to ease deployment and accessibility of its applications in the cloud.

enStratus

Co-Founder, CEO: David Bagley

Cloud configuration management company enStratus fined-tuned its platform throughout 2012 with a series of releases to give enterprises more options and tools to orchestrate and extend their deployments across public, private or hybrid cloud environments.

GigaSpaces

CEO: Zeev Bikowsky

GigaSpaces specializes in application virtualization platforms and scaling, silo-free architecture to create distributed, mission-critical application environments, and cloud building technologies with its XAP Elastic Application Platform and Cloudify products.

Gizmox

CEO: Navot Peled

Gizmox is rapidily gaining adherents for its VisualWeBGui platform, which lets enterprise applications run on HTML5-based Web, cloud and mobile platforms without plug-ins. Companies such as IBM, Visa, Texas Instruments and SAP run VWG applications.

Heroku

Salesforce.com-owned Heroku, the open-language cloud application Platform-as-a-Service that supports Ruby, Java, Python, Clojure, Scala and Node.js., is becoming increasingly in demand for its ability to meet big data needs with its Postres database service as well as for sharing live query results.

Intalio

President, CEO: Raj Jain

Intalio focuses on offering enterprises private cloud applications and open-source, business process management service. Intalio|BPMS is a widely deployed Business Process Management System that provides components to design, deploy and manage the most complex business processes.

LongJump

Founder, CEO: Pankaj Malviya

The LongJump PaaS includes a database with a suite of prebuilt application templates to allow users to automate, run, customize and build enterprise apps with workflow processes and data policies, enabling collaboration. Premade applications can be selected to suit business needs.

Morphlabs

Co-Founder, CEO: Winston Damarillo

Morphlabs’ mCloud products use a modular architecture to integrate compute, storage and networking to offer low-cost private clouds. In October, Morphlabs and Dell unveiled an SSD-based cloud architecture for enterprises to increase storage performance in private clouds.

MuleSoft

President, CEO: Greg Schott

MuleSoft characterizes its CloudHub PaaS as a platform that allows developers and application teams to integrate and orchestrate applications and services across business and the cloud. Its CloudHub SaaS Edition provides tools and services for SaaS integration in the cloud.

OS33

President and Co-Founder: Jacob Kazakevich

OS33’s technology platform allows MSPs to provision cloud-based infrastructure resources, publish applications, select from a catalog of preintegrated business software, activate third-party SaaS offerings, and manage permissions. Small managed service providers can build cloud services through its Master MSP program.

Parallels

CEO: Birger Steen

Parallels, a well-known cloud service enablement and desktop virtualization software provider, offers cloud services integration with its Application Packaging Standard mechanism. Independent software vendors rely on Parallels service provider partners to reach millions of SMBs.

Red Hat

CEO: Jim Whitehurst

Red Hat is fast developing its OpenShift PaaS, recently unveiling OpenShift Enterprise, an open, on-premise platform for businesses usable inside customer data centers or in private, public or hybrid clouds. Red Hat also expanded its OpenShift Partner Program with new partner categories and partners.

Rightscale

Co-Founder, CEO: Michael Crandell

RightScale is all about cloud management. Its service offers a single view into a customer’s cloud infrastructure, allowing users to access private cloud and public cloud resources on one dashboard. Users can quickly provision server workloads deployments and automate and manage them.