The 20 Coolest Cloud Infrastructure Vendors Of The 2019 Cloud 100
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The cloud infrastructure market has been led by the usual suspects for nearly a decade now, including industry giants Amazon Web Services, IBM and Microsoft. But the hybrid cloud trend has turned the market on its ear, and it's leaving room for players such as VMware and Virtustream to enter the fray.
Cloud infrastructure today doesn’t just mean servers. It also includes network, storage, virtualization and management services, which is opening the door for niche providers to get into the game. The global cloud infrastructure market is projected to exceed $206 billion by the end of 2020. More businesses are not simply moving their workloads off-premises, but they're also adopting a hybrid approach to cloud computing to get the best of both worlds. And that’s a trend that's only creating more opportunity for cloud service providers—especially of the channel-friendly variety.
1&1 IONOS (Profitbricks)
Achim Weiss, CEO
1&1 IONOS is what provider 1&1 Internet renamed the company after its acquisition of ProfitBricks last year. Together, the two companies are moving past just hosting, and believe its features, state-of-the-art technology, strong privacy policies and airtight data security go beyond what the cloud leaders are offering today.
Amazon Web Services
Andy Jassy, CEO
It's no secret that AWS is an undisputed leader in the public cloud space. But the cloud giant has also been getting serious about its hybrid cloud strategy. This year at re:Invent 2018, AWS Outposts was unveiled, which essentially brings AWS cloud hardware on-premises.
CenturyLink
Jeffrey Storey, CEO
CenturyLink has been working on differentiating itself from its telecom competition. The carrier giant is being led by a blend of legacy and Level 3 executives, and says it is generating about 74 percent of its core revenue from business customers.
Cox Business Services
Pat Esser, President
Cox Business bought channel-friendly cloud service provider RapidScale last year to aggressively grow the reach of its channel program, as well as its managed services portfolio, paired with connectivity. Today, RapidScale, a Cox company, operates within the Cox New Business Ventures unit.
DigitalOcean
Mark Templeton, CEO
DigitalOcean, a company that focuses on cloud developers, appointed a new CEO last year ,tapping former Citrix CEO Mark Templeton for the job. DigitalOcean also recently expanded its cloud platform with a managed instance of Kubernetes that is now generally available.
Evolve IP
Guy Fardone, CEO
Specializing in contact center solutions, Disaster Recovery as a Service, and unified communications, Evolve IP has been aggressively working to expand in the U.S. and overseas at the behest of its partner community. One of Evolve IP's most recent acquisitions was cloud communications provider Advanced Integrated Technologies Inc.
Flexential
Christopher Downie, CEO
Formerly known as Peak 10 + ViaWest, channel-focused Flexential has been integrating its two partner programs since Charlotte, N.C.-based Peak 10 and Denver-based ViaWest came together in 2017. The now-national cloud provider is eyeing primary, or tier-one, markets in larger cities.
Sundar Pichai, CEO
Cloud giant Google is still aggressively courting enterprise customers with the help of its partners. At the same time, the firm is going through an executive change. Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene left the company in January, and in her place, former Oracle executive Thomas Kurian stepped up to the plate.
Green Cloud technologies
Keith Coker, CEO
Green Cloud Technologies has an impressive portfolio that includes cloud and managed IT services that can be sold via a white-label model exclusively through partners. In September, the provider unveiled plans to open its new headquarters and said it would create 50 new jobs over the next five years.
IBM
Ginni Rometty, CEO
IBM is continuing to give the cloud competition a run for its money. Most recently, Big Blue signed a deal with British telecommunications firm Vodafone to take on its cloud and hosting unit in an eight-year, $550 million outsourcing deal.
Matrix IBS
Neely Loring, President and COO
Matrix IBS has been specializing in hosted applications and data center services for midmarket clients for more than 20 years. Most recently, the company has been focusing on helping its partners offer SD-WAN solutions.
Microsoft
Satya Nadella, CEO
Microsoft's cloud products, including its Azure public cloud offering and the ever-popular Office 365 product suite, continue to dominate in the crowded cloud market. Microsoft's commercial cloud business increased an impressive 47 percent year over year to $8.5 billion during its fiscal first-quarter 2019.
NTT
Tetsuya Shoji, CEO
NTT Communications wears many hats. The global provider offers ICT services, including cloud, data center, connectivity and security. NTT Communications has plans in 2019 to expand the interconnection of its Nexcenter data centers in Tokyo and Osaka to give businesses the ability to connect with more cloud and content services.
OVH US
Russell Reeder, CEO
Newcomer OVH US, founded in 2016 as a subsidiary of the France-based OVH Group, has worked hard for the past several years to expand its footprint into the U.S. The provider said that it plans to triple its investment to go after AWS, Google, and Microsoft.
PhoenixNAP
Ian McClarty, President
PhoenixNAP offers data center, cloud and co-location services. In the fall, PhoenixNAP began offering dedicated servers featuring Nvidia Tesla GPUs for graphics-heavy workloads, something especially usefully for science institutions, enterprises and midmarket organizations using artificial intellitence for business intelligence, according to the company.
Rackspace
Jay Eazor, CEO
Privately held Rackspace is known for its channel-friendly roots, and the company also partners with some of the world's largest cloud providers, including AWS. In fact, Rackspace in January launched a new managed service for migration to AWS’ cloud database tools, including Amazon Aurora.
Spectrum Enterprise/Navisite
Sumeet Sabharwal, Group Vice President and General Manager, Navisite
Navisite is the enterprise-focused cloud service provider owned by cable giant Spectrum. Navisite is a top Microsoft and VMware cloud partner. The provider upgraded its Managed Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solutions this summer to include support for the new VMware Horizon DaaS 8.0.
Tierpoint
Jerald Kent, CEO
TierPoint, a channel-friendly cloud provider and data center operator, is continuing to actively grow its business organically as well as through partnerships. In January, Tierpoint unveiled a partnership with telecom provider PCCW Global to offer a global software-defined interconnection platform using TierPoint’s infrastructure with access to PCCW Global’s Console Connect.
Virtustream
Rory Read, CEO
Dell Technologies subsidiary Virtustream offers cloud management software for private, public and hybrid cloud environments for enterprises, governments and service providers. The dynamic provider has been focusing on deepening its relationships with channel partners.
VMware
Pat Gelsinger, CEO
VMware, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies, has had a big year. The virtualization giant in August cut the price of VMware Cloud on AWS by half to drive more adoption. In a market-shaking move, VMware also revealed a hybrid cloud partnership with public cloud leader AWS in the fall.