Hardware companies are on a downhill slope while server enterprises are on a steady uphill trek and startups continue to thrive in the IT industry. The question is, who among these cloud companies are on its way to the top. Obviously, and based on the current enterprise trend those with the best scalable platform and easily integrated framework gets the best leverage.
In terms of cloud infrastructure, Amazon.com seem to have the upper hand because it is almost impossible to mention a cloud provider without the mention of this cloud giant. Currently, Amazon has 60,000 users including pharmaceutical companies, major banks and several large companies. They have earned this status through their Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) intense compute feature, which is now considered as one of the top supercomputers of this age.
Rackspace Hosting Cloud Servers also made it on top of the list in infrastructure computing. With almost 80,000 servers operating across the globe by the 3rd quarter of 2011, Rackspace capitalizes on the shared-principle with Amazon that “bare” cloud computing gives its users more control over their business solutions. This holds true for Amazon and Rackspace, but would be very difficult for small players who cannot even afford to invest on 1,000 server hosts. In the meantime, Rackspace and Amazon dominate this scale utility arena. Other utility service providers are also trying to make a mark that include Verizon that recently acquired Terremark, AT&T that took Synaptic Compute, IBM and VMWare.
There are companies that prefer to manage their business solutions in their own platform. This is very useful for companies that have uniquely defined projects that utilize their own software. Salesforce.com through its Force.com and Microsoft’s Azure leads this cloud platform. Force.com offers a sort of template programming for dummies that prefer to run object-oriented development that are already built-in and programmed within the platform. Microsoft Azure, on the other hand, provides problem compute solutions through its .Net service. Google, alternatively, uniquely operates using software through a platform in its search engine cloud solutions.
In the area of cloud storage, Amazon’s Simple Storage Service tops the list for its ability to host as much as 500,000 requests per second even during peak hours. VMWare’s EMC storage service also continues to post record-high revenues for the company.
Here is a table taken from Yahoo Finance and YCharts that feature revenue records of the leading cloud providers today.
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Not to forget Joyent, Heroku, Xeround and many others innovating in the PaaS arena. Mass-market wise it’s Amazon, Rackspace in the IaaS and Google and Azure in PaaS that pull the strings. But new entrants are joining as there are many innovation opportunities. lunacloud.com is one of them, from Europe.