by Linksku

Cloud Computing becomes more popular and basically transforms the IT industry by the minute. Year 2009 was the year of Virtualization, but 2010 is becoming the yea of Cloud Computing. As more large IT vendors and even small startups are shifting products and services into the Cloud, confidence in Cloud Computing is building up in the end-users and most importantly in IT managers and CIOs.

I personally cannot remember the last time I browsed a major news web site and did not come across at least one article that mentions SaaS, PaaS, IaaS or Cloud Computing as a whole.

When there is such a great movement in the industry with new players joining the “game” every day it becomes harder to keep track of which Cloud Computing vendors and companies are reputable and which offer good products and services.

At this point I truly believe that doing your own research on the “Best Cloud Computing Vendors” or “Top SaaS Companies” is too overwhelming and can become a challenge for some folks.

If you have not tried “Google-ing” the key phrases mentioned above, take a moment and give it a try. You will soon find that there are tons of web pages talking about who the best Cloud Computing companies & vendors are, but you will also find that today there are hundreds of those companies – Yes, the list goes and goes…Some are big and you have heard their names before (Many big IT providers have already realized the potential of Cloud Computing and got a head start), others are not so popular, but that does NOT disqualify them from the race to become a leader in the Cloud Computing race.

At the moment very few of those sources have credible information on the key search phrases mentioned earlier (See Above). Most of the lists you cannot trust! Most people compile them just to bring traffic to their web sites! Confused??? Don’t be!

Trust professional sources that do extensive review, research and product testing before they come up with a list of  “The Best ….”.

Last month GigaOM announced the winners of Structure 2010 LaunchPad.

-          GigaOM is a premier destination site for technology industry insiders, movers and shakers, and early adopter consumers. It is widely considered the authoritative site for discovering what’s new, relevant and interesting in the dynamic world of technology. From exclusive product launches to award-winning analysis and commentary, GigaOM’s coverage influences business and technology sectors with its reliable, well-researched and professional reporting — and its signature intelligence, candor, and irreverence.

-          LaunchPad is a high-profile competition that recognizes the 10 most promising cloud companies. From the large number of entries 11 were chosen as winners based on their forward-thinking vision, and sustainable business models. This year’s competition was so fierce that the judges could not pick only 10 companies, hence the 11 listed.

The winners will present their companies on stage at Structure 2010, the largest and most influential cloud computing conference in the industry, set to take place June 23-24, 2010 in San Francisco.

The winners of the LaunchPad competition are:

  • Benguela - A stealth mode startup company founded by Amazon EC2 veterans
  • Cloudant - MapReduce based data management with analytics and search
  • Cloudswitch – Makes enterprise cloud adoption easy by solving key problems
  • Datameer - The Big Data power of Hadoop made accessible through a spreadsheet interface
  • Greenqloud - Provider of completely carbon neutral cloud provider
  • GridCentric - Turns your compute farm into a high-performance, private cloud in seconds
  • nephosity - Allows non programmers to allocate tasks and workflows on the cloud
  • Northscale - Provide a simple, fast, schema-free mechanism for storing data objects
  • Riptano - Apache Cassandra (Facebook’s data layer) management software and services
  • SolidFire - Next-generation block-basedvw storage platform for cloud computing providers and big enterprises
  • Zettar Inc - Create secure private storage cloud using commodity storage assets

Structure 2010 is selling out fast, but tickets are still available. To register for Structure 2010, visit http://events.gigaom.com/structure/10/.

© 2010, SaaSChronicles. All rights reserved.

Related Posts: