Taking Stock Of Cloud Computing

(MoneyWatch)  Contrary to popular preconceptions, cloud computing isn't the stuff of start-ups and fringe companies ?€" it's really big business run by very public companies (and I don't just mean Salesforce.com and VMware). My colleague Erik Sherman has an interesting take on the cloud computing business model, but putting aside his thoughts regarding Salesforce.com, it's clear that cloud computing is itself a greater and greater part of the IT industry fabric.

Stephen Foskett notes that

since no company (except perhaps Salesforce.com) derives 100% of its revenues from cloud computing at this point, none can be called true cloud computing companies.

But to get a sense of which companies have jumped into that market, he put together a list of public companies with some degree of cloud computing products or services, a sample of which includes:

• Amazon.com (EC2, SimpleDB, S3, CloudFront, SQS Compute)
• Citrix (Xen, Cloud Center)
• Digital Realty Trust (Data center development)
• EMC (Atmos, Atmos Online)
• Google (Google App Engine, Google Apps)
• IBM (Smart Business, Lotus Live, CloudBurst)
• Microsoft (Azure Platform as a service with compute, database, and storage)
• Oracle (Sun xVM, Kenai/Speedway, MySQL Software for service providers)
• Rackspace (Cloud Servers, Cloud Files, Cloud Sites Compute and storage as a service)
• Verizon (Business CaaS Infrastructure as a service)

Looking at those names, it's obvious that the Verizons and IBMs of the world are blending in the cloud stuff with their old-school tech, with an eye to increasing the relative weighting of cloud to their service or product mix.

[Image source: Michael Marlatt via Flickr]