5 Powerful Competitors in Cloud Computing

Competition exists everywhere be it politics, business, industries or the glamour world and Cloud is not different there is intense competition in the cloud business as well. 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 listed are top key players in the Cloud Business

# 1 Amazon

Amazon has emerged as the champion in the cloud computing world. This company is undoubtedly the no.1 provider of cloud infrastructure with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offering, and also tops the list of cloud platforms for development and deployment of applications. 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. A recent research from Accenture analyst Huan Liu estimates that Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) runs on a whopping 450,000 servers.

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 need not purchase any hardware for their business, instead they can use Amazon’s cloud infrastructure for a small rent and store their data. Amazon, like most of the big cloud providers, doesn’t disclose much about current or planned data centers neither does the company break out Amazon web Services (AWS) revenue, but experts predict it could probably be a billion dollar Business Company reports Barb Darrow in Gigaom.com

#2 RackSpace

This company is the leader in cloud based web hosting and encompasses managed services and pure hosting businesses.  Gartner analyst Lydia Leong says that Rackspace is presently in the second position when measured interms of revenue and Virtual Machines. The company’s public cloud service revenue rose to $189 million in fiscal year 2011, up from $100M the previous year according to gigaom.com

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!

#3 Google

Google is one of the major player in internet technology and with its Google App Engine platform as a service the company has made it to the list of top cloud service providers. Google is one amongst the few companies that has the potential to invest in core computing firepower to give a tuff 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 Microsoft

Microsoft is gearing up in the cloud business with its Windows Azure Platform.  Microsoft’s cloud platform is just two years and has already made it big 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 a complete set of services including computing environments, scalable storage, database functionality and a content delivery network.

 

#5 Salesforce

Salesforce.com has steadily been transitioning from a best of 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 through the cloud.Force.com is a platform-as-a-service that 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.