Introducing Company Profiles: Highlighting Today's Cloud Computing Leaders
Cloud computing is defined as much by the companies delivering these new services, as it is by technology or anything else. Our company profiles highlight the leaders in this emerging market, with new ones added weekly.
The 3 Pillars of Cloud Computing
Interview With CloudSwitch Co-Founder Ellen Rubin
I recently sat down with CloudSwitch co-founder Ellen Rubin to learn more about her company's solution for solving some of the biggest hurdles facing enterprise customers from making cloud computing an integral part of their IT strategy.
Company Profiles
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – Generally refers to “basic” infrastructure meaning raw compute power, network bandwidth, and data storage services.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) – A higher-level integrated development environment that abstracts the underlying technology to provide for scalability and rapid application development and deployment.
Software as a Service (SaaS) – End-user facing software that is delivered on demand. There are many providers across a broad range of business software, systems management, and security applications.
3PAR
3PAR is a global provider of on-demand storage, a market that continues to grow in tandem with the growth in data of all types. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) storage resources are provided via highly-virtualized, tightly-clustered, and dynamically-tiered storage arrays built for utility...
3Tera
3Tera is a developer of system software for utility and cloud computing and was one of the first cloud vendors in the market to deliver a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. 3Tera's AppLogic integrates the user interface, grid operating system, metering, and billing into one complete platform...
Akamai
Akamai has, almost literally, been at the center of the explosion of the Internet with their solutions to help improve the performance of everything from accessing email, watching a video, or using a web-based application. With the ascendancy of cloud computing, the requirements placed on the...
Amazon
Amazon is probably one of the best known web-based, or online, businesses in the world. Today, Amazon.com is a $15 billion business. However, Jeff Bezos, Amazon's Chairman and CEO, realized that it wasn't just their ability to sell books online that was impressive. They had also gained a...
Appirio
Cloud computing and, specifically, Software as a Service (SaaS) represent an important evolution of technology, computing and business transformation. Benefits such as greater flexibility, capacity on-demand, and lower total cost of ownership are well known to those following on-demand or cloud-...
Appistry
Appistry's Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution addresses the challeng of building, deploying, and managing mission-critical applications. Since it's been designed specifically for cloud environments, whether public or private, it excels at scalability, fault tolerance, and automated...
Aravo
Aravo, founded in 2000, delivers Software as a Service (SaaS) supplier management, risk management, and sustainability management solutions to Fortune 500 and small and medium sized businesses around the world. All of Aravo's solutions leverage the Supplier Information Management (SIM) platform,...
BlueLock
While Amazon may be the best known cloud computing providers of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), over the short period that this market has existed, a handful of "new" IaaS vendors has emerged. That fits with BlueLock, although in reality they started in 2006, the same time as Amazon. But, today...
Bluewolf
Cloud computing, in general, and Software as a Service (SaaS) in particular represent a profound evolution of technology and computing. Benefits such as greater flexibility, capacity on-demand, and a lower total cost of ownership are well known to those following the trend. However, without the...
Box.net
Box.net, a software as a service (SaaS) provider of content management, has garnered a lot of press since it was founded in 2005. Creative advertising campaigns, a simple tag-line ("sharing should be simple") and positioning themselves as an alternative to Microsoft SharePoint has all certainly...
Canonical
Canonical is the commercial enterprise behind Ubuntu, one of the most popular open source distributions of the Linux operating system. The company provides support, engineering and professional services, as well as, hardware and software certification for Ubuntu. When it comes to Ubuntu, things...
Cisco
Cisco, well-known for its success in supplying the bits and pieces that form a company's network backbone, does not lack for ambition. It has built its router and switch business into a $36 billion behemoth, allowing it to invest in related markets, such as consumer products, unified communications...
Citrix
Citrix executed a strategic acquisition of XenSource in 2007 that allowed it to challenge for leadership in virtualization. And while one of it's main rivals, VMware, holds sway in the enterprise business market, Citrix leads the way with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud vendors since Xen...
Cloud.com
Cloud.com, formerly known as VMOps, was started in 2008 and is a well-funded startup with total funding to date is $17.6 million. Its management team has roots in open source, virtualization and infrastructure development. The company says it has pioneered a new approach to simplifying and...
Cloudera
Cloudera has come a long way in less than a year, garnering a lot of attention from investors, the media and potential customers. Cloudera has based its business around Hadoop, the open source implementation of MapReduce, with the goal of making it far easier for organizations of all types to store...
CloudSwitch
Cloud computing is many things: an evolution of computing, an extension of technology (e.g. virtualization) and a topic of hot debate. When someone wants to cut cloud computing down to size, rightly or wrongly, they'll argue it's not ready for prime time. They'll claim it's all hype or that we've...
CohesiveFT
CohesiveFT is a provider of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) that compliments virtualization and cloud computing platforms, whether public, private, or hybrid clouds. CohesiveFT's Elastic Server platform provides a cross-platform virtual appliance or, as they say, a "factory" for building and...
Dell
Michael Dell has been busy reinventing the company that bears his name. Everyone knows his college dorm-room-to-riches tale, so to discount his vision and drive would be foolish. And, as it turns out, cloud computing is a central piece of his turn-around strategy, along with a push into...
Elastra
Elastra helps enterprises acheive the benefits of cloud computing without losing the visibility and control that their IT teams need, and are used to. The Elastra Enterprise Cloud Server is an IT service management tool that has been designed from the ground up for cloud computing. Elatra's...
Engine Yard
Engine Yard has evolved from a managed hosting provider of Ruby on Rails applications to a full-fledged platform for Ruby on Rails application development, deployment and mangement. Their Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings can leverage the Amazon EC2 public cloud or, can be run on the Engine...
Enomaly
Enomaly provides a programmable virtual cloud infrastructure for businesses to host and manage applications either in a public or private cloud within the customer's data center; they also deliver a solution customized for carriers and service providers. Solutions are targeted at bringing the...
Eucalyptus
Eucalyptus Systems delivers open source software that enables organizations to build on-premise private and hybrid clouds utilizing the software and hardware already in place within the enterprise's datacenter. Their Platform as a Service (PaaS) is billed as "the leading open source private cloud...
F5
Cloud computing is an evolutionary step in the way information technology (IT) is built by providers and delivered to end-users. It is not any one technology or product. Cloud computing will transform IT into a services-based model. In order to operate a cloud-based service "at scale" one must...
FinancialForce.com
FinancialForce.com is the evolution of financial software specialist CODA 2go and was launched by Unit 4 Agresso, its parent company, in conjunction with the stake from Salesforce.com. It's built on the Force.com platform - Salesforce.com's application development platform as a service (PaaS) - and...
Force.com
Force.com is Salesforce.com's Platform as a Service (PaaS) that not only underpins their CRM solutions, it also enables customers, developers, and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to build their own Software as a Service (SaaS) applications without the need to invest in the infrastructure to do...
GetApp.com
GetApp.com is organizing the largest vendor independent online marketplace for business cloud-based applications. Businesses of all sizes come to GetApp.com to find, compare and choose from a wide range of enterprise applications efficiently organized and categorized with rich information for easy...
GoGrid
As said before, the cloud computing market is an evolutionary one. And one reason for that is companies like ServePath, who began life as a internet service provider in 1995. ServePath has taken their experience and expertise with virtualization and grid computing and further refined and expanded...
Google App Engine
Google entered the cloud platform arena with a bang after several years of speculation. In April 2008, they launched Google App Engine and, while the news wasn't unexpected, it did serve notice to the industry that one of the giants of computing was ready to put its vast resources behind a concept...
Google Apps
Google began a billboard campaign in early August across four cities -- Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco -- to get the word out that Google Apps means business. They called it "Going Google" and stated in clear terms what everyone should know, like "Ah. Going Google means switching to...
Heroku
Geva Perry, in his blog Thinking Out Cloud, made an interesting observation that "...Ruby developers are the cloud generation." The Ruby language and Ruby on Rails, the application framework, are very popular among those building next-generation web sites and web services. It shouldn't come as much...
HP
HP brings a range of products and services to market for customers who want to take advantage of cloud computing. They offer distinct solution sets for Infrastructure as Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). HP has on-demand software and professional services an organization can use to...
Hyperic
Hyperic provides monitoring and management software for all types of web-based applications and has three broad product lines: web application management, operations intelligence, and cloud monitoring. In terms of cloud computing, even though an application gets deployed to the cloud, that doesn't...
IBM
IBM has the breadth and depth from across it's business units -- software, hardware, and services -- to allow it to play a significant role in the advent of cloud computing. They have a wide range of cloud computing offerings across each pillar -- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a...
InMage
InMage is an independent software vendor (ISV) of disk-based, business application recovery solutions for both physical and virtualized environments. The company’s integrated recovery software supports both local and remote backup and disaster recovery, and is designed to work well in heterogeneous...
Joyent
Joyent started out by offering a platform that enabled collaboration with shared applications like email, contacts, calendaring, and file sharing. Today, they're a cloud computing provider offering a line of virtualized servers called Joyent Accelerators, which businesses use to power large-scale...
Kaavo
Kaavo provides Infrastructure as Service (IaaS) tools for building and managing applications in the cloud. Kaavo publicly launched its Infrastructure and Middleware on Demand (IMOD) solution in January 2009 as "the world's first application-centric management and security solution for cloud...
Keynote Systems
Keynote Systems' on-demand test and measurement solutions show customers, in real-time and from an end-user's perspective, how their web business performs at the application, transaction and infrastructure level. Real-time analysis and trouble-shooting is increasingly important as more companies...
Layered Tech
Layered Tech has two primary lines of business: virtualization and cloud computing services (i.e. IaaS), as well as, managed dedicated hosting. Layered Tech's infrastructure, located in eight data centers globally, is used to support web sites and host applications from customers across a broad...
LongJump
LongJump, part of Relational Networks, provides both Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) to enterprises, independent software vendors (ISVs), and service providers (SPs). The LongJump Business Application Platform helps companies speed application design, deployment, and...
Microsoft
When Ray Ozzie announced Microsoft's formal entry into cloud computing with the Azure Services Platform he stated, "We have introduced a game-changing set of technologies that will bring new opportunities to Web developers and business developers alike. The Azure Services Platform...gives our...
Monitis
Monitis provides comprehensive systems management and monitoring Software as a Service (SaaS) that can be run in a public cloud like Amazon EC2 or, deployed as an internal, private cloud. Their solutions help reduce application and network downtime, while improving efficiency of IT; Monitis can...
Morphlabs
Morphlabs' mCloud series enables the rapid deployment of cloud delivery platforms for managed service providers (MSPs) and enterprise data centers. Built on industry-leading cloud standards facilitating the hybrid implementation of both public and private virtual resources, the mCloud series...
Nasuni
There has been a lot of talk about the hype and reality of cloud computing. But, there are a few signs that clearly point to its viability. Both venture capitalists and investment bankers have been busy investing in start-ups and managing acquisitions for companies like CA and VMware. That activity...
Netlist
Netlist designs, manufactures and sells an array of high-performance, logic-based memory subsystems for the server, storage and communications equipment markets. The innovative memory subsystems, with value-added technology, solve cloud computing system-level problems of capacity, performance,...
NetSuite
NetSuite is a provider of Software as a Service (SaaS) business applications that are completely integrated and include ERP/accounting, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and E-Commerce. They're designed for small and medium-sized businesses to run managed key business operations via a single...
New Relic
As much as cloud computing is an evolution of how information technology gets delivered, it's also a convergence of factors that are technological as much as cultural. An example of this is the dramatic increase in the use of Ruby and Ruby on Rails by web developers. Geva Perry hit on this when he...
Nirvanix
The cloud storage market is growing and gaining popularity as customers realize the cost advantages of moving unstructured data like documents, video, and medical images out of their own data centers. The need only grows due to the amount of non-essential archival data that needs to be stored for...
OpSource
OpSource was built to serve the needs of organizations of all types looking to leverage cloud computing, whether as a consumer or a provider of cloud-based services. Enterprise customers can tap into their infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings via a "virtual private cloud within the public...
Oracle
In September 2008, Larry Ellison said, "The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements." Before finishing, he pulled back a little and...
Parallels
Parallels, founded in 1999, has a broad range of solutions running the gamut from desktop and server virtualization software, server and operating system consolidation, development and test environments, and enterprise IT and database automation. Since virtualization is a core component of cloud...
ParaScale
ParaScale is a start-up in the burgeoning Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud storage market. In late March 2009, they announced their flagship product, ParaScale Cloud Storage (PCS), which has been in beta testing with 15 customers, is heading into general availability. ParaScale Cloud...
Pentaho
The open source business intelligence and data integration leader, Pentaho Corporation provides a comprehensive BI suite that includes capabilities for data integration/ETL, modeling, data mining, analysis, reporting and dashboards. The Pentaho BI suite supports the company’s Agile BI initiative,...
PerspecSys
Security and privacy are areas that continue to come up time and again with cloud computing. Storing and sharing sensitive data is central to most people's concerns with cloud-based services. Of course, to be fair, such concerns are always paramount to users whether stored on-premise or not. For,...
Qualys
Qualys is one of the leading providers of on-demand security risk management and compliance management solutions. Security and compliance needs have grown in tandem with the growth of the internet and the drive to open a company to customers, suppliers, partners and employees. Qualys' Software as a...
Rackspace
Rackspace was founded in 1998 and is a well-known managed hosting provider. In 2005, the company decided to branch out into the emerging cloud computing space and launched at set of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings known as Mosso.com. Since then, they've evolved their offering and...
RightScale
RightScale provides a cloud computing management solution to enable companies to design, deploy, manage, and automate business-critical applications in the cloud, whether in a public (e.g. Amazon, Google App Engine, GoGrid) or private cloud. RightScale's software as a service (SaaS) solution brings...
rPath
rPath has taken their expertise and technology in creating virtual appliances for the distribution and consumption of applications and tailored it so enterprise customers can easily and cost-effectively build and move applications into a public or private cloud environment. rPath's technology helps...
Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is probably the best known cloud computing provider in the market by virtue of the fact that they've been so successful as a vendor of on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Since its inception and founding in 1999 by Marc Benioff, they've helped lead the way in delivering...
Savvis
Savvis was formed by the merger of two companies with several years experience and expertise in high-performance private IT infrastructure and internet services. Initially targeting the financial services industry, they expanded and went public in 2000. Today, Savvis opeates 28 data centers...
Skytap
Skytap is a leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions for dynamic workloads, including application development, testing, virtual training, ERP migration and sales demonstration projects. Skytap enables users to run enterprise applications unchanged in the cloud, collaborate...
SOASTA
At a recent cloud computing conference, one of the keynote speakers asked how long cloud computing has been around. Most answered a year or two; the correct answer was 10 years with the launch of Salesforce.com. And while many associate cloud computing with Salesforce or Amazon, on-demand CRM, or...
Sonian
Cloud computing is often described as a disruptive shift in the IT landscape. Sometimes that can be misconstrued as a one-time event, rather than a process that will occur over time. In fact, the way cloud computing is transforming how businesses operate can be seen in some very practical ways....
SuccessFactors
SuccessFactors delivers an integrated suite of talent and performance management solutions to organizations of all sizes through the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. Over the years, companies have learned that the most valuable asset they have is their employees. SuccessFactors solutions help...
SugarCRM
SugarCRM bills itself as the leader in commercial open source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. SugarCRM is a complete set of integrated CRM applications that cover sales, marketing, support, reporting, mobile, and collaboration. There are three versions available with subscription-...
Sun Microsystems
Sun has a vast arsenal of hardware and software assets it's brought together to create compelling cloud computing services, whether as a direct provider of those services, as a partner to service providers, or as a supplier to organizations that are looking to launch their own private clouds. It...
Taleo
Taleo's value can be assessed in two ways. First, there's the understanding that managing and developing the talent of a organization is critically important to its overall success. Often, companies look at human resources in transactional terms. But, a holistic workforce approach views talent and...
Terremark
Terremark built its business around managed hosting, co-location, network and security services before formally entering the cloud computing market last year. They built their Enterprise Cloud offering on their Infinistructure utility computing Web-based platform, which includes an integrated...
TIBCO Silver
TIBCO is well-known for its business integration software used to help organizations create a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and improve business process management (BPM). So, it was only a matter of time before it would formally get into the cloud computing market. In June 2009, they did just...
Ubuntu
Canonical is the commercial enterprise behind Ubuntu, one of the most popular open source distributions of the Linux operating system. The company provides support, engineering and professional services, as well as, hardware and software certification for Ubuntu. When it comes to Ubuntu, things...
Unisys
Unisys is a company to watch in the cloud computing market. Perhaps not known as an industry leader, even with a history that stretches over 100 years, this latest evolution of computing might be the wave that raises their profile and unlocks the company's true potential. In more recent years,...
Verizon
As cloud computing continues to pick up momentum and more organizations start to look at it as a viable alternative to traditional on-premise computing, the cloud provider landscape is changing as well. Along side early pioneers like Salesforce.com and Amazon and new upstarts like GoGrid and Heroku...
VMware
VMware's CEO Paul Maritz explained how virtualization lies at the heart of the evolution of the data center during his kenote at VMworld 2009. He called it an evolution that would lead to the emerging cloud paradigm, but he knows VMware will have its work cut out for itself if it is become the...
Workday
Workday was founded in 2005 by Dave Duffield, the former founder and CEO of PeopleSoft. They tout their solutions as "the opposite of ERP," meaning they've built their solutions from the ground-up for cloud computing by harnessing the power and flexibility inherent in delivering Software as a...
Zetta
One of the reasons cloud computing is gaining in popularity is because some traditional on-premise solutions almost cry out for a better approach due to complexity and cost. One of those areas is enterprise-class storage. Not only is it resource intensive (i.e. people, space, and capital), but data...
Zoho
Zoho offers a number of Software as a Service (SaaS) business, productivity, and collaboration applications for individuals, as well as, small and medium-sized businesses. Their suite of office productivity tools consists of many free applications like email, chat, word processing, and spreadsheets...
