Welcome!

Cloud Expo Authors: Pat Romanski, Liz McMillan, Maureen O'Gara, Gathering Clouds, Stephen Pierzchala

Related Topics: Web 2.0, Cloud Expo

Web 2.0: Article

Which Cloud Services Providers Are Gaining Mind Share?

Amazon, NetSuite, and Salesforce.com, have been in the news recently with a number of announcements

Cloud Computing on Ulitzer

There is little doubt that cloud computing is big news, but who is gaining your mind share?  Amazon, NetSuite, and Salesforce.com, have been in the news recently with a number of announcements. 

So many that I've been attempting to track them by creating specific journals for each.

Our experiences are likely to be different, and barring actual surveys and research, is subjective and based largely on our own impressions and perceptions of which companies are in the news or making news in this segment.

There are several lists that are excellent points of reference - The Top 150 Players in Cloud Computing, 85 Cloud Computing Vendors Shaping the Emerging Cloud, and The VAR Guy's SaaS 20 Index.

Large technology companies like AT&T, EMC / VMware, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Unisys, and others that come to mind have not been included below in the top 20 that are gaining mind share, and I would expect that for most of these companies the focus would be the largest of enterprises with very large complex engagements.

So here is my (purely subjective) list of the Top 20 Cloud Services Providers gaining mind share.

  1. Amazon (AWS) (Scalable on demand infrastructure)
  2. Appirio (On demand acceleration products and services)
  3. Astadia (Business consulting and SaaS solutions)
  4. Bluewolf (On demand software deployment services)
  5. Boomi (SaaS integration),
  6. CohesiveFT (Realtime custom (virtual) server build),
  7. Constant Contact (Marketing)
  8. FreshBooks (Billing and invoice management)
  9. Google Apps (Productivity Tools – Gmail, Gtalk, GCal, GDocs, GSites)
  10. Intacct (On Demand Financial applications),
  11. Intuit (Financial Software)
  12. Joyent (Scalable on demand infrastructure)
  13. LongJump, (PaaS for SaaS rapid application development),
  14. Model Metrics (Force.com site development and cloud services integration),
  15. NetSuite (On demand, integrated business management software)
  16. Salesforce (CRM and Force.com development platform)
  17. Vertica (Analytics database for cloud computing)
  18. Zoho (Productivity Suite)
  19. Zuora (Subscription billing for the cloud – more extensive than paypal – support Salesforce.com enterprise and pro editions), and
  20. 37Signals, (Best known for its BasecampHQ project management software, and Highrise contact management software).
Industry focused mentions go to:


Clearly this isn't an all inclusive list of all the excellent work being done by numerous companies in this segment, but simply a list of those gaining my mind share.  Who's gaining on yours?

More Stories By Ray DePena

Ray DePena worked at IBM for over 12 years in various senior global roles in managed hosting sales, services sales, global marketing programs (business innovation), marketing management, partner management, and global business development.
His background includes software development, computer networking, systems engineering, and IT project management. He holds an MBA in Information Systems, Marketing, and International Business from New York University’s Stern School of Business, and a BBA in Computer Systems from the City University of New York at Baruch College.

Named one of the World's 30 Most Influential Cloud Computing Bloggers in 2009, Top 50 Bloggers on Cloud Computing in 2010, and Top 100 Bloggers on Cloud Computing in 2011, he is the Founder and Editor of Amazon.com Journal,Competitive Business Innovation Journal,and Salesforce.com Journal.

He currently serves as an Industry Advisor for the Higher Education Sector on a National Science Foundation Initiative on Computational Thinking. Born and raised in New York City, Mr. DePena now lives in northern California. He can be followed on:

Twitter: @RayDePena   |   LinkedIn   |   Facebook   |   Google+

Comments (1) View Comments

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.


Most Recent Comments
Brenna 09/02/09 02:28:00 PM EDT

I think Carpathia Hosting is gaining ground in the Cloud computing industry with their AlwaysOn/InstantOn platform. They show signs of growth as well, they just acquired ServerVault, who was a pretty big player in secure hosting.

Cloud Expo Breaking News
At pennies per virtual machine-hour, the economics of cloud computing are both compelling and daunting to replicate. Whether you are building your own cloud infrastructure, building a public cloud or choosing a cloud service, there are key strategy and technology decisions that make the difference between success and failure. In his General Session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Jason Waxman, VP in the Intel Architecture Group and general manager of the Cloud Platforms Group within Inte...
“Social, mobile, analytics and cloud can’t be looked at as distinct technology trends; they are facets of the same movement and an everyday reality for consumers and businesses alike,” said Craig Sowell, IBM VP of SmartCloud Marketing, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “This means that businesses need to start looking at trends as one: cloud is the delivery, analytics is the unique insight, social is a shareable service, and mobile is the ubiquitous access.” ...
New, "Super-Sized" 4-Day Cloud Computing Bootcamp is a brief introduction to cloud computing carefully created and devised to help you keep up with evolving trends like Big Data, PaaS, APIs, Mobile, Social and Data Analytics. Solutions built around these topics require a sound cloud computing infrastructure to be successful while assisting customers harvest real benefits from this transformational change that is happening in the IT ecosystem.
"Since Cloud Expo is running the week of June 10, we thought it'd be a great idea to schedule our Meetup this week. That way, if you have colleagues, friends, or family in town that week for the Expo, you can invite them to join you!" With those words, the OpenStack New York Meetup Group's organizer's launched a landing page this week where anyone interested can register for the June 12 evening event.
Organizations want extraordinary results from their IT units. Today's mantra is faster delivery, better quality, cheaper solutions, and safer environments. Many CIOs are implementing cloud computing enterprise architectures to address these challenges with results varying greatly. Why are some organizations seeing only limited results from cloud computing implementations while others are increasing market share, decreasing costs, generating value, and innovating faster?
With Cloud Expo New York | 12th Cloud Expo [June 10-13, 2013] hurtling towards us, let's take a look at the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference coming up June 10-13 at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City. We have technical and strategy sessions for you all four days dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, wha...
“Big Data analytics will shape the form of nearly every process going forward in time, from the color of the latest fashions, what the candidates say in one town versus another to the chemical composition of the latest super drug,” noted Steve Knodl, Director of Product Management at NextIO, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “Whether these are considered “new” products,” Knodl continued, “or continuous improvement on previous processes is largely in the eyes o...
The rise of cloud computing has exposed hard drive-based storage as the new data center bottleneck. Combating this, data center managers have deployed SSDs to gain the performance needed to provide real-time access to data. However, due to budget constraints, many have turned to consumer-grade SSDs without understanding that they wear out quickly when processing enterprise workloads. In this session, Esther Spanjer will discuss recent endurance advancements in SSD technology that enable usage of...
“Open source has always provided a number of benefits, including easing adoption costs, propagating a better understanding of the technology, and allowing for faster evolution and commercialization of products and services based on it,” noted Terry Woloszyn, Founder & CEO, Leeward Security Ltd., in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “This is clearly evident with the OpenStack and CloudStack,” Woloszyn continued, “and others that have been quickly commercialized as...
SYS-CON Events announced today that OpenStack will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. OpenStack software controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed by a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface. OpenStack powers some of the most widely-used SaaS app...