The 20 Coolest Cloud Infrastructure, IaaS Vendors Of The 2014 Cloud 100

The Coolest IaaS Vendors Of 2013

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) -- or the delivery of compute, storage and network resources via the cloud -- continues to be the fastest-growing segment of the overall public cloud services market. Gartner last year projected the IaaS market to grow as much as 47.3 percent in 2013 alone, reaching a value of $9 billion.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is still the IaaS market king, leveraging its massive compute capacity, competitive pricing and sprawling product portfolio to remain on top. But AWS also faces increased competition from rivals including large telco companies to smaller, but stealthier, IaaS startups.

Here's a look at the coolest cloud infrastructure vendors to make this year's CRN Cloud 100 list.

Amazon Web Services

CEO: Jeff Bezos

AWS has leveraged its aggressive pricing model and broad ecosystem of technology partnerships to remain the undisputed king of the IaaS market. Now, AWS is diving into virtual desktops with its Amazon Workspaces service, which lets customers rent access to virtual desktops running in the AWS cloud.

AT&T

CEO: Randall Stephenson

AT&T is bolstering its enterprise private cloud offerings through a number of new partnerships, including one with systems integration giant CSC that will make AT&T the official host of CSC's BizCloud private cloud solution through at least 2020. AT&T also announced a deal with Microsoft, through which AT&T will pair its VPN technology with the Windows Azure cloud platform.

CenturyLink Technology Solutions

President and CEO: Glen Post III

CenturyLink Technology Solutions acquired public cloud service supplier Tier 3 in November, providing a foundation for the telco's overall cloud strategy and technology for its new cloud development center in Seattle. And in June, CenturyLink Technology Solutions bought AppFog and its platform-as-a-service technology for cloud application development and deployment.

Cisco Systems

CEO: John Chambers

Cisco is steadily upping its game in the cloud market, launching last year its new Application Centric Infrastructure for simplifying and optimizing application deployments in cloud environments. The networking giant also introduced a redesigned version of its Cloud Partner Program that offers more resources and incentive opportunities to Cisco partners investing in cloud services practices.

Cloudscaling

CEO: Randy Bias

San Francisco-based startup Cloudscaling launched its first channel partner program last year to drive enterprise adoption of its OpenStack-based Open Cloud System platform. The program, called the Cloudscaling Elastic Cloud Partner Program, arms solution providers with certified components for quick deployments of OpenStack-based public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructures.

Comcast

CEO: Brian Roberts

Comcast and its growing base of solution provider partners continue to offer cloud-based infrastructure, storage and backup solutions to businesses of all sizes. Based on the belief that almost all small businesses today embrace the cloud as a cost-effective alternative to traditional IT infrastructures, Comcast recently launched Upware, a cloud-based application marketplace specifically built for small- and mid-sized shops.

EMC

CEO: Joseph Tucci

EMC is a perennial leader in cloud infrastructure with a wide variety of offerings, including its VCE joint venture with Cisco and VMware. The storage giant continues to stage a major cloud and SDN offensive, most recently through its acquisition of storage software startup ScaleIO.

GoGrid

CEO: John Keagy

Don't let GoGrid's small size fool you: The so-called "pure play" IaaS cloud provider was praised by Gartner this year for its "broad and aggressive SLAs" that feature 100 percent availability across servers, storage and networking. GoGrid also has a common architecture across its public and private portfolios, and sells its paid-by-the-VM, Xen-virtualized platform through the channel.

Green Cloud Technologies​

CEO: Shaler Houser

Green Cloud Technologies protects data in the cloud through disaster recovery systems that mirror a company's server and backs that up with virtual servers based on VMware's virtualization software. Green Cloud even backs up people: It offers a video conferencing technology called iMeet that managers and employees use when they can't reach the office because of a disaster.

Hewlett-Packard

CEO: Meg Whitman

HP is a force to be reckoned with for the depth and breadth of its cloud offerings from its fast-growing enterprise-grade public cloud to its converged systems and underrated big data/analytics software portfolio. The payoff for partners playing across the portfolio is best in class.

IBM

President and CEO: Virginia Rometty

While IBM's SmartCloud offerings have been around since 2011, Big Blue took a big step into the public cloud infrastructure market when it acquired SoftLayer Technologies in June. Earlier this month IBM committed to spending $1.2 billion to boost its cloud computing business, including building 15 data centers around the globe.

Joyent

CEO: Henry Wasik

Joyent sells public cloud IaaS on a per-VM basis (it also offers private cloud systems) and runs its cloud systems on SmartOS, an open-source offshoot of OpenSolaris that's designed for high-performance workloads. Joyent also sponsors development of Node,js, the popular software platform for building scalable network applications.

Microsoft

CEO: Steve Ballmer

Already a player in the platform- and software-as-a-service arenas, Microsoft moved aggressively in the IaaS market in 2013 with the launch of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services. Since then, the software giant has been throwing down the gauntlet against rival AWS, offering a series of aggressive price cuts for its cloud compute and storage offerings.

NaviSite

CEO: Brooks Borcherding

NaviSite, a Time Warner Cable company, has bulked up its cloud portfolio with the addition of NaviCloud Director, a VMware vCloud-powered IaaS platform that arms businesses with a more flexible and customizable hybrid cloud environment. What's more, NaviSite recently opened its doors to the channel with its first-ever partner program.

Nebula

CEO: Gordon Stitt

Nebula's OpenStack-based hardware appliance leverages an open source architecture that Nebula says makes it the "least locked-in hardware company in history." The appliance is meant to streamline the deployment and management of private clouds, and to help businesses better handle the influx of big data, Web and mobile applications.

NTT Communications Corp.

CEO: Akira Arima

NTT Communications Corp., the parent company of global solutions provider Dimension Data, recently fueled its U.S. cloud offensive by acquiring cloud network services provider Virtela Technology Services, along with an 80 percent stake in data center services provider RagingWire. The deals, NTT said, effectively double its U.S. data center space.

Peak

CEO: Luke Norris

Peak, formerly known as PeakColo, is an enterprise-class IaaS cloud provider that sells exclusively through the channel. The company, which is fresh off a $4 million round of investor funding, came to market last year with IaaS White Cloud, a cloud service that partners can completely rebrand and resell as their own. Peak even offers solution providers a dedicated network connection from the partner location to Peak's cloud, plus 24/7 support.

ProfitBrick

CEO: Achim Weiss

ProfitBrick's position is that Cloud 1.0 has failed to deliver on the promises of flexibility and cost-effectiveness. Through 37 data centers with more than 70,000 servers in the U.S. and Europe, ProfitBricks' IaaS lets customers and partners choose the CPU, RAM and block storage that best meets their needs.

Rackspace

CEO: Lanham Napier

Recently ranked No. 29 on Fortune's "Best Companies To Work For," Rackspace continues to be one of the industry's leading OpenStack cloud providers. In November, Rackspace introduced Performance Cloud Servers, a redesigned version of its flagship public cloud offering that delivers greater throughput and more than double the performance.

Terremark

CEO, Verizon: Lowell McAdam

Terremark operates Verizon's cloud, data center and security units. The company made a big push into the public cloud space in October when it expanded on its core Enterprise Cloud service by launching Verizon Cloud Compute, a new IaaS offering, and Verizon Cloud Storage.