85 Cloud Computing Vendors Shaping the Emerging Cloud: Page 5

In July 2008, the company closed a $15 million series B round of funding led by New Enterprise Associates and with participation from Amazon.com and Benchmark Capital, which financed the company’s $3.5 million Series A round.

With financing from Amazon, Engine Yard gets automatic cloud credibility. Additionally, the Ruby on Rails community is an active and growing one, giving Engine Yard a significant group of potential customers to target as it continues to evolve.

Notable: Founded in 2006, Engine Yard is lead by CEO John Dillon, who previously served as President and CEO of Hyperion Solutions and CEO for Salesforce.com. COO Don Jaworski came to Engine Yard from Brocade Communications, where he served as VP of Product Development.

41) Enomaly
Cloud computing has introduced a blizzard of new terms, and one you’ll likely be hearing more of is Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS. With IaaS, clients no longer invest in bulky hardware, large datacenters and complex apps. Instead they buy (or rent) a complete virtual stack from an IaaS provider.

Enomaly’s flagship product, Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) enables a variety of service providers – such as hosting providers, telcos, and managed service providers – to establish Infrastructure as a Service solutions for their clients. With ECP 3.0, customers use a real-time dashboard system to monitor and control a multi-tenant service provider cloud platform, which ties in with provisioning and billing systems.

Enomaly claims that over a dozen service providers, domestically and abroad, are now establishing IaaS solutions leveraging the company’s ECP. High profile clients include France Telecom and Best Buy. Looking ahead, by the end of this year Enomaly expects to unveil what it calls a “high assurance cloud technology,” which it says will provide enhanced security.

Notable: The company’s CEO, Richard Reiner, was founder and CTO of Assurent Secure Technologies (acquired by TELUS in 2006), a SaaS firm that focused on IT security. Reiner holds a number of patents in the area of software security.

Never forgetting its roots, Enomaly – founded in 2004 – continues to support the development community based on its earlier generation open source code; the app is called ECP 2.x Community Edition.

42) Terremark
Terremark provides “utility-enabled managed IT infrastructure solutions.” The company began rolling out its cloud computing services last summer. Terremark’s Enterprise Cloud is a managed cloud platform for deploying mission-critical applications.

Enterprise Cloud’s Infinicenter web portal allows users to configure and provision virtual servers and server groups. It also has features for organizing servers according to role and dynamically extending them according to utilization.

Terremark is one of the few cloud computing vendors to give concrete financials regarding their cloud sales. In a conference call discussing Terremark’s Q1 fiscal year 2010 earnings, CEO Manny Medina reported $2.5 million in revenues related to cloud services.

That’s a small part of its overall revenues, which totaled $65.8 million, but it’s solid start for a year-old service in a nascent market space.

Notable: In May, VMware put its weight behind Terremark’s cloud and managed IT approach, purchasing 4 million shares of newly issued common stock at $5 per share, for a total investment of $20 million.

43) eVapt
eVapt focuses on an overlooked but pesky part of SaaS and cloud offerings: metering and billing. The company says that its On Demand Monetization Platform takes “the pain out of monetizing” SaaS and cloud services.

Tools within the solution address service provider pain points, such as the difficulty of providing flexible pricing and billing models, insufficient usage data, and the high cost of manual billing.

Customers include PeopleAdmin, QuickArrow, and Economist.com.

Notable: eVapt has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Applied Reasoning.

44) FlexiScale
FlexiScale provides public cloud computing resources and hosting. Based in the UK, FlexiScale’s most direct competitor is Elastic Hosts. As with Elastic Hosts, however, FlexiScale is gunning for bigger quarry, namely Amazon and Google.

For both of these startups, a large chunk of their value proposition is simply location. They’re based in the EU and, their logic goes, thus better able to serve EU customers. That logic sounds reasonable, but both Amazon and Google have EU-based data centers. However, these companies are arguably better versed in the needs of their EU customers and better able to navigate issues like EU regulatory compliance.

FlexiScale also touts a more fully featured service offering, providing a support team, standard IP addresses, 100% SLAs and more as standard features of its package.

Notable: FlexiScale is owned by XCalibre, a UK-based web hosting company.

45) Unisys
Unisys designs, builds and manages mission-critical computing environments. The Unisys cloud product line, which it is still building out, will enable clients to choose the type of data center computing services that best meet their business objectives, from self-managed private clouds to managed cloud services to hybrid solutions.

The company launched its Secure Cloud Solution on July 31. Secure Cloud enables enterprise clients to securely move conventional business applications – including those with secure or sensitive data, such as human resources, financial, customer and healthcare information – into a managed, shared cloud service without costly, time-consuming rewrites or other alterations.

With security and compliance being two big cloud sticking points, Unisys is taking steps to address those issues. Its Stealth data protection technology “cloaks data from detection as it moves through the network.” Thus, users in a multi-tenant environment can share the same IT infrastructure without fear of compromising the security of their data. The company also plans to release a Stealth version for SANs to protect “data at rest.”

Notable: Earlier this month, Unisys responded to the current recession through private debt exchange offers that reduced the company’s total outstanding debt by approximately $130 million (~12%) and reduced 2010 debt maturities to $65 million.

46) iLand
Among its other products and services, iLand offers VMware-based cloud computing services for small- and medium-sized enterprises. Unlike some of its competitors, iLand's cloud supports nearly every operating system, including all Windows versions, Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD. It currently operates five SAS70 certified data centers in the US and one in the UK. In addition to production application cloud hosting, the company also offers "cold" hosting for disaster recovery situations and co-location for companies who wish to house their own servers in iLand's facilities.

Notable: iLand recently announced a partnership with Vizioncore that improves their replication capabilities.

47) GoGrid
A division of ServePath, a web hosting company, GoGrid provides a “multi-tier, cloud computing platform that allows you to manage your cloud hosting infrastructure completely on demand through an intuitive, web interface.”

GoGrid is directly positioned against Amazon EC2. It differentiates itself through broader support of various Windows and Linux operating systems, lower pricing and a 100% uptime SLA. This is really splitting hairs, though, since Amazon offers a 99.95% uptime SLA .

Notable: GoGrid claims 2,000+ customers, including high profile companies like Novell and SAP.

48) Good OS
Good OS currently offers two products. The first product, gOS, is a full desktop OS that was used in the Everex line of desktops that were sold at Wal-Mart before Everex closed its doors.

The second product, Cloud, is a web browser combined with a pared down operating system for Web, email and chat. It’s suitable for netbooks and mobile devices, but also allows for toggling between other browsers on devices with the processing power to do so. Of course, with a name like Cloud, the OS is designed to shield constrained devices from processing and storage burdens, moving them instead to the cloud. Instead of booting to a desktop, as with gOS, Cloud instead uses the browser as a desktop replacement.

Notable: The company was founded by David Liu, who previously founded and ran a web development company.

49) HyperOffice
HyperOffice isn’t usually included in cloud discussions because, unlike many of the other vendors on this list, the company doesn’t slap the term cloud on everything it does. The term it does slap on everything is collaboration, which in this case is descriptive, rather than marketing spin – but if you think back a few years, the term “collaboration” used to have about the same amount of hype as “cloud computing” does today.

HyperOffice’s collaboration suite contains all of the usual suspects in terms of features: email, calendar, contact management, document management, and project management.

Most collaboration suites can be loosely defined as hosted in the cloud, whether a public or private one. That alone wouldn’t cut it for this roundup, but in May HyperOffice announced a concerted effort to target its collaboration suite to cloud customers by teaming with Etelos, a provider of cloud PaaS solutions.

Notable: HyperOffice also offers a cool application for driving collaboration to the iPhone – and what is the data side of the iPhone, especially the iPhone App Store, but a cloud-based application depository – albeit a rather closed one?

50) Quantivo
Quantivo provides on-demand behavior analytics software designed to help retailers better understand their customers and increase sales. Their portfolio includes products and solutions aimed at both online and brick-and-mortar retailers and both B2B and B2C operations. In order to use the in-the-cloud service, customers first complete an interview with Quantivo personnel to determine which products will fit their needs; they then upload their data to the Quantivo data center. Analytics become available within a couple of business days.

Notable: Winner of multiple awards, Quantivo was recently named to the Red Herring 100 North America and was listed as one of five Cool Vendors in Retail by Gartner.

51) Intridea
Based in Washington, D.C., Intridea is a web development and consulting company. Yes, there are about a million firms like that, but Intridea has designed some pretty cool cloud-based applications, such as Present.ly, a social networking and micro-blogging service, and Earth Aid, which provides consumers with energy monitoring and reduction tools and then pays them for saving energy by selling energy savings credits on the carbon credit market.

Most of Intridea’s applications are built on Ruby on Rails.

Notable: Founded by Dave Naffis, who is a senior partner and serves as lead architect, and Yoshi Maisami, a senior partner and head of business development, Intridea has several Fortune 500 customers, including AARP, Comcast, GEICO and McKinsey & Co. Government agency customers include NIH, NSA and NASA.

52) ThinkGrid
UK-based ThinkGrid currently operates four data centers (or, as they would write, "centres") in the US and the UK. Their key services include hosted desktop, hosted e-mail, file sharing, hosted phone and VOIP, cloud storage and backup, and server hosting. Although they focus primarily on small- and medium-sized businesses, they do also some solutions targeted at the needs of enterprises.

For potential customers who are curious about how cloud computing works, they offer the opportunity to try it out for free.

Notable: Recent customer wins include London's Heythrop College and IPTV provider CompleteTV.

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