Intelligent Machines
Companies to Watch: Public Companies
Name: Adobe, www.adobe.com/products/air
Market Cap (in billions): 15.8
Cloud Products: AIR, LiveCycle ES Developer Express
Notable Acquisitions and Partnerships: None
Major Customers: eBay, New York Times, Time Warner
Market Position: Lets programmers develop cloud-based applications that can use local computing resources when needed.
Name: Akamai, www.akamai.com
Market Cap (in billions): 3.8
Cloud Products: EdgeComputing, Web Application Accelerator, NetStorage, Global Traffic Manager
Notable Acquisitions and Partnerships: OpSource
Major Customers: MySpace, HP
Market Position: Rapidly remobilizing its content delivery network for cloud computing.
Name: Amazon, aws.amazon.com
Market Cap (in billions): 37.4
Cloud Products: Amazon Web Services
Notable Acquisitions and Partnerships: Amazon has made venture investments in Engine Yard and Elastra
Major Customers: Linden Lab (Second Life), Washington Post
Market Position: Offers à la carte computing power, storage, and Web content delivery.
Name: Google, www.google.com/a
Market Cap (in billions): 137.4
Cloud Products: Google Apps (Gmail, Google Docs), App Engine
Notable Acquisitions and Partnerships: Postini
Major Customers: Genentech, University of Arizona, city government of Washington, DC
Market Position: With the launch of App Engine, developers can use Google’s infrastructure to host and maintain their own applications.
Name: IBM, www.ibm.com/cloud
Market Cap (in billions): 143.5
Cloud Products: Computing on Demand
Notable Acquisitions and Partnerships: Outblaze
Major Customers: Indigo BioSystems, Elizabeth Arden, United States Golf Association, University of Pretoria
Market Position: Its 10 global cloud-computing labs let businesses tap into IBM’s computing power and expertise in building and managing data centers.
Name: Intel, www.intel.com
Market Cap (in billions): 92.1
Cloud Products: Xeon 5500 processor, Data Center Manager, Node Manager
Notable Acquisitions and Partnerships: None
Major Customers:
Market Position: Recently released Xeon 5500 processor could dominate the huge data centers that will be built as cloud computing expands.
Name: Rackspace, www.mosso.com
Market Cap (in billions): 1.3
Cloud Products: Mosso Cloud Sites, Cloud Files, Cloud Servers
Notable Acquisitions and Partnerships: Slicehost, Jungle Disk
Major Customers: Razorfish, Radio Flyer
Market Position: Its cloud-computing division, Mosso, is promising more reliability, better support, and less downtime than main competitor Amazon Web Services.
Name: SalesForce.com, www.salesforce.com/platform
Market Cap (in billions): 4.8
Cloud Products: Force.com
Notable Acquisitions and Partnerships: InStranet
Major Customers: Harrah’s Entertainment, Japan Post, New Jersey Transit
Market Position: With Force.com, the company has created a platform that lets a business’s IT staff build and host applications using the company’s infrastructure.
Name: Sun, www.sun.com/solutions/cloudcomputing
Market Cap (in billions): 7.82
Cloud Products: Sun Open Cloud Platform, Sun Cloud
Notable Acquisitions and Partnerships: Q-layer
Major Customers: None yet; product launching in beta this summer
Market Position: Promising a set of open APIs, the company is launching cloud storage and computing services later this year.
Name: Yahoo, research.yahoo.com/cloud_computing
Market Cap (in billions): 22.7
Cloud Products: Yahoo Small Business, Zimbra
Notable Acquisitions and Partnerships: Zimbra
Major Customers: Comcast, H&R Block, UCLA
Market Position: Its popular Web applications and open-source projects keep the beleaguered company in the picture.
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