Five Companies Shaping Cloud Computing: Who Wins?

[JMaguire]

This article covers the battle for cloud marketshare (which is just
now getting truly serious) between the top players: MSFT, Amazon,
Google, Salesforce and IBM:

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/features/article.php/3798591/Five-Companies-Shaping-Cloud-Computing-Who-Wins.htm

It's interesting in that it describes how rich the potential cloud
market it, but how still unformed the strategies of the big players
are.

Which company do you think will ultimately be the big dog in cloud
computing?

My personal bet is the IBM-Google alliance shaping up, but it's still
hard to say.

thanks-

James Maguire

[Dan Kearns]

Pretty funny article. To paraphrase:

IBM's cloud strategy is.... Google!
Google's strategy is... Salesforce!
Salesforce's strategy is... Amazon! (and Facebook, but they don't rate as a cloud service?)
Microsoft's strategy is... Microsoft!

Oh, and Terremark, Akamai, Sun, Box.net and AT&T round out the list of obvious contenders, while Yahoo apparently has some kind of email service in addition to its crazy-popular "pipes", and just keeping a million or so servers running doesn't qualify you as any sort of expert in IT management.

-d

[Johan Louwers]

AL big player will be google-opensource. IBM and google Are both from
a different kind. in my opinion they will never form a aliance on
cloud computing, they differ to much. Google and the opensource
community are friends, not always have been, they are used to one
another and will contineu to grow a bond. Just look at the google
plans to launche open source hardware. The google open hardware
switch, just to kick out juniper.

So no ibm, rather google and opensource community is my thought.

Regards
Johan Louwers


Sent from my iPhone

[Partha Panda]

It is important to classify these different players and the spaces they operate in -

1) Microsoft and Google today are operating in the PaaS space

2) Amazon is operating in the IaaS service

3) Salesforce.com is in the SaaS space.

 

So not all of them are necessarily competing with each other today. Will there be some convergence in the future - absolutely. The rights for customers to be able to choose best of breed in each area and being able to mix and match will be a very key driver among others for Cloud adoption. Personally, I see convergence of traditional data centers, SaaS and Iaas moving forward as these seem to have an early mover's advantage.

Cheers

Partha Panda

[Kristoffer Sheather]

I'm interested to hear peoples thoughts in regards to the future do
people see for the smaller, and regional IaaS cloud providers? Prime
examples right now would be providers such as Joyent, GoGrid,
FlexiScale, and Elastic Hosts.

Will they be squeezed out by regional cloud deployments from Amazon
(EU zone for instance may affect FlexiScale & ElasticHosts),
commoditization enabled by open cloud standards (and hence rampant
price wars to follow IMO), or migration from IaaS to PaaS offerings
from Microsoft (Azure), Google (AppEngine), etc?

Regards,
Kris

> > On 30 jan 2009, at 22:14, JMaguire <jmagu...@jupitermedia.com> wrote:
>
> > > This article covers the battle for cloud marketshare (which is just
> > > now getting truly serious) between the top players: MSFT, Amazon,
> > > Google, Salesforce and IBM:
>

> >http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/features/article.php/3798591/Five-Co...

>
> > > It's interesting in that it describes how rich the potential cloud
> > > market it, but how still unformed the strategies of the big players
> > > are.
>
> > > Which company do you think will ultimately be the big dog in cloud
> > > computing?
>
> > > My personal bet is the IBM-Google alliance shaping up, but it's still
> > > hard to say.
>
> > > thanks-
>

> > > James Maguire- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[Greg Pfister]

On Feb 1, 5:33 pm, Kristoffer Sheather <k...@vnext.com.au> wrote:
> I'm interested to hear peoples thoughts in regards to the future do
> people see for the smaller, and regional IaaS cloud providers?  Prime
> examples right now would be providers such as Joyent, GoGrid,
> FlexiScale, and Elastic Hosts.

I don't have the whole answer, but here are a couple of factors that
might favor regional/small providers:

- political / legal boundaries. It may be illegal to ship certain data
out of some area, or there may be interacting privacy considerations.
US' Patriot Act vs. Canadian privacy provisions have already been
mentioned here as an example.

- specialization to an application area. If a cloud comes with
application-specific middleware making your life a lot easier, tools
the big boys don't have, it can thrive and even lock you in. It's
unlikely anybody's going to squeeze Salesforce.com out of its area,
for example. Whether such folks will be better off staying as a
separate cloud or selling that middleware on, e.g., EC2 -- a good
question.

Factors favoring big providers, like economies of scale and distance
being shrunk by the Internet, are pretty obvious.

For "specialization." I think Microsoft's got a one-two punch here:
They're big, and they have specialization: the tools and platform
making migration from existing Windows platforms comfortable.

Greg Pfister
http://perilsofparallel.blogspot.com/

[R Chishty]

I would like to add a comment about Salesforce.com

With the recent news regarding the push to keep jobs in America and no doubt similar activities for the rest of the world from their local governments and in additional to the numerous legal issues on the transfer of information data from country to county (being enforced in the UK, Australia and US for example)

I find it curious that one of the many issues with end users is the locality and security of where the data is going to reside when talking about non-critical applications usage yet people the same users are happy to plug in critical data on customer information in salesforce.com!!

If salesforce can do it, why shouldn't other local providers of IaaS do it too?

Comments anyone?

Ruz

Triactive.asia

> Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 08:41:01 -0800
> Subject: [ Cloud Computing ] Re: Five Companies Shaping Cloud Computing: Who Wins?
> From: greg.p...@gmail.com
> To: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com

[xd...@comcast.net]

Just to add some thoughts:

Google is also in the SaaS space with GMail, GoogleDocs, and until
recently Google Video.
Microsoft will likely also start to show up in the SaaS spaces over
2009-10, given the nature of their strategy (that's my speculation at
least)
SalesForce.com operates on Force.com, and that is a PaaS offering that
is available as well.
IBM and Sun both play in the IaaS space today, and I thought I had
heard that HP and AT&T might be moving into this area soon too.

I'd personally have a hard time calling out "big players" in SaaS,
mainly because as this area matures the "big" players will be the apps
that people need and can operate in the Cloud well. Over time this
will be rated more like apps today with "big" being relative to the
functionality of the app. For example, office / knowledge work
provider, CRM provider, security services provider, etc. Once you
break out to providing multiple disparate functions in the Cloud I'd
think we begin to see them move from SaaS to PaaS.

Big PaaS today - Force.com, GoogleApps. Soon to be Microsoft (Azure,
LiveMesh, S + S)
Big IaaS today - Amazon, IBM, Sun. Soon to be? HP and AT&T

I wholeheartedly agree that mix and match would be great and very
necessary for the Cloud Ecosystem to really reach the overall promise,
but the technology cynic in me thinks that no vendor will be motivated
to create open and interoperable standards from the start, rather
doing the traditional "try to get a big market share then drive the
standard to what we are doing" model. I hope I'm wrong on that. :)
The good news on this front comes from the Open Source area IMO, which
will drive adoption of better standards faster because to get the
mobility and agility required, without finding themselves locked to a
single vendor, the big enterprise customers will have to insist on
interoperabilty so they can purchase best of breed vs single vendor.

[Raghavan "Rags" N. Srinivas]

Hi all:

To add my $0.02 ... I agree w/ the tenor of this mail that it's possible that some
of the SaaS application providers might even surpass the platform provider in
terms of notoriety ... I don't think anyone knows what's the killer app(s) for
cloud computing in general and SaaS in particular ...

There is very little in terms of standards for the cloud to show for. Check out
my recent blog at

http://ragss.wordpress.com

Right now many of these SaaS apps. are islands, but, sooner than later they
will need to be bridged in as standard a way as possible, for example to be able
to integrate a salesforce app with an app. on the Intuit Partner Platform that uses
QuickBooks ...

It's important not to confuse open source and open standards although the
former might lead to some adhoc standards and it's faster adoption ...

Thanks!

Rags
---
http://www.linkedin.com/in/ragss

[Kristoffer Sheather]

Greg,

I absolutely agree that the regional players key strengths will be the
much reduced latency (vs a US hosted solution), and data locality
which avoids the cross border legal & privcy issues with data storage.

The smaller providers should also be able to provide a more flexible
solution, with tailored support agreements for individual clients that
the big players may not want to provide. So there is room for
differentiation from the smaller players which will help them compete
against the larger players.

Regards,
Kris

On Feb 3, 3:41 am, Greg Pfister <greg.pfis...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 1, 5:33 pm, Kristoffer Sheather <k...@vnext.com.au> wrote:
>
> > I'm interested to hear peoples thoughts in regards to the future do
> > people see for the smaller, and regional IaaS cloud providers?  Prime
> > examples right now would be providers such as Joyent, GoGrid,
> > FlexiScale, and Elastic Hosts.
>
> I don't have the whole answer, but here are a couple of  factors that
> might favor regional/small providers:
>
> - political / legal boundaries. It may be illegal to ship certain data
> out of some area, or there may be interacting privacy considerations.
> US' Patriot Act vs. Canadian privacy provisions have already been
> mentioned here as an example.
>
> - specialization to an application area. If a cloud comes with
> application-specific middleware making your life a lot easier, tools
> the big boys don't have, it can thrive and even lock you in. It's
> unlikely anybody's going to squeeze Salesforce.com out of its area,
> for example. Whether such folks will be better off staying as a
> separate cloud or selling that middleware on, e.g., EC2 -- a good
> question.
>
> Factors favoring big providers, like economies of scale and distance
> being shrunk by the Internet, are pretty obvious.
>
> For "specialization." I think Microsoft's got a one-two punch here:
> They're big, and they have specialization: the tools and platform
> making migration from existing Windows platforms comfortable.
>

> Greg Pfisterhttp://perilsofparallel.blogspot.com/

> > > - Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -

[Gaja Kannan]

Personally I feel there is enough money to go around for all the vendors in Cloud...

 

SalesForce.com will continue to dominuate CRM SaaS - I have real doubts on their AppExchange being a successful enterprise computing platform.

Amazon.com will certainly carve a market for IaaS - storage vendors like EMC would be a threat to Amazon

Google & Microsoft are the only real vendors that are competing head on each other.  My guess just like .NET and JEE co-exist in enterprises, both will have a market share of PaaS.

I really dont know if IBM has a place yet in cloud...