Top 10 Cloud providers 2012
1. Amazon Web Services
For the third year in a row, Amazon Web Services (AWS) tops our list, and not just by dint of remaining the dominant player in public cloud computing worldwide. Over the past year, AWS has been on a roll shipping a rich variety of new services targeting enterprise IT, a market that has proved hard to penetrate for public cloud providers but promises great returns for those that do. Additionally, in a strategy to drive the market to follow its moves, AWS has cut prices 19 times in just the past six years. Although Amazon.com doesnt fully break out its cloud services revenues, AWS would appear to be a $6 billion company based on its performance in 2011. Thats in comparison to Amazon.coms overall revenues of $48 billion for the year -- not bad for a business reputedly created to sell the e-retailers excess compute capacity back in 2002.
2. Rackspace
Rackspace Inc. may be this years sleeping giant. Although it hasnt made any billion-dollar acquisitions the way several competitors have in 2012, the co-creator of the OpenStack open source cloud OS is positioned to remain a leader on the cloud provider rolls. In fact, the OpenStack community just shipped its fifth release, code-named Essex, in early April. Rackspace, which started out as a custom applications hosting company in 1998, provides traditionally managed hosting as well as public cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS), and hybrid cloud services that blend the two technologies. The company grossed almost $1.3 billion in fiscal 2011, up from $629 million in 2009, pushing growth well into double digits annually with about a fifth of that coming from its cloud businesses last year. The company began the year with 4,040 employees -- who are referred to as "rackers" -- more than 170,000 customers and nearly 80,000 servers in more than 233,000 square feet of data center space worldwide.
3. CenturyLink/Savvis
One of three telcos to make this year�s list, CenturyLink demonstrated how serious it is about becoming a top-tier cloud services player when it snapped up Savvis Inc. in a deal valued at just under $2.7 billion last year. At least on paper, the merging of CenturyLink�s hosting, networking and other infrastructure assets, married with Savvis� collection of cloud products, colocation and managed hosting cloud services, figures to make the company a formidable competitor going forward. The two companies now have a network of 48 international data centers with nearly 2 million square feet of floor space. Another asset Savvis will appreciate is CenturyLink�s deep pockets: CenturyLink completed its acquisition of Qwest Communications last year, a deal worth $10.6 billion. The combined company has revenues of $18.7 billion with earnings of $8.1 billion. This should be enough walking around money to compete against big, cash-rich telcos such as Verizon/Terremark and high-tech monsters like EMC, HP, IBM and Microsoft.
4. Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com isn�t living on Cloud 9 yet, but it appears ready to inhabit Cloud 2. The company that successfully pioneered cloud-based, enterprise-class CRM solutions, looks like it is poised to charge into the next era of cloud computing. This era, which its brash chairman and CEO, Marc Benioff, refers to as Cloud 2, is one that is all about social media, mobile computing and real time. Salesforce believes its acquisition of Heroku, with its popular Ruby Platform as a Service, will help it establish a leadership position there. The deal gives Salesforce access to all of Heroku�s technology and intellectual assets, along with its growing base of Ruby-based developers that have delivered some 105,000 applications. Another symbiotic element that should work in the duo�s favor is that Heroku�s platform is designed from the ground up to be multi-tenant, a hallmark of Salesforce�s Force.com platform.
5. Verizon/Terremark
When we put Verizon/Terremark on our Top 10 cloud computing providers of 2011 list, its future as one of the largest telco/cloud hybrids was still uncertain. Would enterprise cloud consumers see the value of the $1.4 billion deal? And would Terremark be able to give enterprises the customization they so desired? Well, a few things have come to the fore since then: Terremark certainly hasn�t lost its cloud presence and Verizon definitely is not the only telco that sees the hot cloud computing market as a lucrative investment. Further proving its dedication to the enterprise customer, Terremark launched its Enterprise Cloud Private Edition -- a single-tenant environment reportedly offering the level of security many large enterprises and government agencies require. And its OS- and network-agnostic strategy shows the telco cloud understands the value of accessibility and integration. Competition will be tight in 2012, though, as other telco cloud service providers like CenturyLink/Savvis, Level 3/Global Crossing and even Tata Communications fight to be heard in a market that�s cranking up the volume.
6. Joyent
Joyent Inc. has made some friends in high places. In 2010, Dell chose Joyent to power its cloud; the public cloud provider is also the cloud engine behind several online gaming platforms as well as LinkedIn, the popular professional social network. This year, Joyent has been making announcements left and right about new strategic partnerships, focusing its efforts on data-intensive, high-performance applications, including partnerships with Data Layer as a Service provider Cloudant; Nodejitsu, which develops tools for Node.js; and Venice, Calif.-based online media startup-for-startups Amplify. With a major industry focus in 2012 on big data and HPC, Joyent could be on the right track. It will be interesting to see how much clout the Infrastructure as a Service provider has, especially as it continues to licenses its cloud software to telcos that are just beginning to launch their own cloud platforms.
7. Citrix
If market researcher IDC�s prediction that the cloud infrastructure market will grow to $11 billion by the end of next year is correct, then the folks running Citrix are going to look pretty smart. Citrix Systems Inc. has bought a basket of cloud computing infrastructure and services companies recently, most notably Cloud.com. Cloud.com�s Cloud Stack, an open source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform, has proved popular among cloud providers preferring to deploy and manage open cloud services. What should also distinguish Citrix is that Cloud.com�s product isn�t built as a traditional server virtualization platform with cloud management layered on top. Rather, it enlists a hypervisor-agnostic model better suited for building larger public clouds. Cloud.com, along with the purchase of ShareFile, a provider of cloud-based data storage, should complement Citrix�s portfolio of virtualization and collaboration products including XenServer, XenDesktop, CloudGateway and GoToMeeting.
8. Bluelock
Bluelock has steadily gained visibility the last several years by aligning itself closely withVMware�s vCloud Datacenter and by delivering cloud services with a solid reputation for reliability. The company, which connects users� VMware data centers with its public cloud, has made a comfortable living focusing largely on small and midsize companies. It offers both cloud hosting coupled with managed IT services, something high on the want list of many IT shops. The vendor so far has done a good job bolstering the confidence of smaller companies to move their mission-critical applications in the cloud and hopes to convince more midsize companies to do the same. Its 2012 roadmap calls for the company to focus more on bigger picture issues such as multiple virtual data center integration, Data Recovery as a Service and the Global Cloud, a place that�s sure to see a lot of action.
9. Microsoft
Microsoft retained a spot on the list again this year as much for its sheer tenacity and the promise of more to come as the size of its checkbook. The company has been very visible regarding its "all in" commitment to the cloud, despite some missteps -- notably the major management service outage that hit a large cross section of its U.S. and European Windows Azure users in February, a.k.a. the "leap year" outage. Microsoft declines to say how its doing with Azure, although its a safe bet the public cloud business is still losing money. But like Windows Phone and, before it, Xbox, Microsoft shows no sign of giving up and continues to roll out new data centers, including one planned for Cheyenne, Wyo. Counting its hosted private cloud productivity suite, Office 365, Microsoft claims 100,000 businesses are using its various online services. The company delivered System Center 2012 last week and is gearing up to deliver Windows Server 8 later this year, which will underlie its private cloud offerings.
10. VMware
It might seem strange to find VMware listed on a cloud provider list. But when you dig into just how involved the virtualization giant is -- and will be -- on the cloud front in the next year or so, you might stop questioning what we�re smoking. The company�s vCloud Director 1.5, an automation engine and management arm for private clouds, has piqued the interest of enterprise IT and a few cloud vendors and service providers including iland and, most recently, Bluelock. And Cloud Foundry, the now year-old open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) aimed at helping build, test and deploy clouds, is slowly gaining ground. VMware is trying to position itself as the go-to guy, the middleman and an enabler to help enterprises get to private and public clouds. Whether businesses buy into VMware�s channel approach -- and whether these �clouds� turn out to be anything more than virtual data centers -- remains to be seen. But one thing�s for sure, VMware figures to be a force in 2012.
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