Competition exists everywhere whether it is in it politics or business. And Cloud industry is no an exception. Cloud computing has revolutionized the technology industry and since it generates good revenue all cloud service providers are in a race to take the lead. Cloud is a set of technologies and market structures that invite competition, as a result the market is hyper competitive in ways that are new and innovative.
Below you may find main competitors and key players in the Cloud industry:
#1 Amazon
Amazon has emerged as the champion in the cloud computing world. This company is undoubtedly no.1 provider of cloud infrastructure with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which tops the list of cloud platforms for application development and deployment. The reason why the company has made it big is because of the fact that they provide attractive services to the business groups and also because of their customer friendly approach.
Amazon is also the most preferred company for cloud management because of its S3 Simple Storage Service offering. The main attractive feature of this company is that the customers do not need to purchase any hardware for their business, instead they can use Amazon’s cloud infrastructure for a small rent and their data storage.
#2 Microsoft
Microsoft is gearing up in the cloud business with its Windows Azure Platform. Microsoft cloud platform has good position already in the cloud market giving the top players a run for their money. The Windows Azure cloud service gives developers the option to host, develop and run web applications. Azure provides complete set of services including computing environments, scalable storage, database functionality and a content delivery network.
#3 Google
Google is one of the major player in the Internet technology and with its Google App Engine platform as a service company’ve had a chance to be in cloud service providers. Google is one among a few companies that has the potential to invest in core computing firepower to give a tough competition to Amazon web Services. Google’s cloud service is aimed at developing and hosting web applications using Google’s infrastructure and data centers and additional advantage is that the engine supports several languages including Java, Ruby and Python. The main selling point of the company is their scalable service that allows developers to pay for what they use without startup costs or recurring fees.
#4 Salesforce
Salesforce.com has steadily been transitioning from the best breed sales force automation (SFA) software as a service (SaaS) provider to an application development platform as a service (PaaS) company. Salesforce is a software-as-a-service provider that specializes in distributing business applications allows developers to use the Salesforce infrastructure to develop add-on applications that integrate with the Salesforce solution. This company is well known to deliver new product features, and new capabilities, on a continuous basis.
#5 RackSpace
This company takes leading position in cloud based web hosting and encompasses managed services and pure hosting businesses. Comparing Amazon’s EC2 and Rackspace: If one intends to scale on EC2, they need to launch additional instances (which you can do with stored AMI’s). At RSC, you just have to point to a running instance and click a button to say “Make this server bigger” (or smaller if you need to scale down). A few minutes later, it’s all done. There is an option of adding additional instances, too!
These are the main players in Cloud industry, how could you predict who would become a leader in this Cloud technology race? Why do you think so? It would be great to hear from you!
The reality is none of the above will ultimately win.
The cloud – well all technology – is amorphous.
There was a time all TV sets had RCA on them, all cash registers had NCR on them, and all copy machines were named Xerox, all cameras said Kodak, and all computers were blue and named IBM. To think you can predict who will win is to assume the topography will not change and the delivery technology is stagnant. It also presupposes these are the only choices. and one will emerge supreme.
Really, in the early days of the internet Yahoo was king. Novel was king of it’s mountain. And Wang was king if text editing. Alas, how the kings have tired.
Perhaps the best way to look at this is which product has the best offering for any given market segment.
Paul is spot on, so I will just expand on one idea. There are markets for cloud computing, cloud computing is not ‘a market’. A .Net shop needs to look seriously at Azure. Now. If this is you, stop reading and go. look. If you want to provide a web offering on the JVM or RoR or php, Rackspace and Amazon are great. I personally think that most developers should be looking for a PaaS from someone like Heroku, which is built upon Amazon’s EC2. The goal for most users is to have a provider provide expert service. I’m pretty sure that I will never hire a network admin better than the folks hired by these major players, so it makes sense to let them do it.