The Cloud Foundation segment of the marketplace includes those companies who provide the tools and software that make up Cloud infrastructure. These companies provide such essentials as server software, virtualization, multi-tenancy, and hypervisor tools.
However, it is important to separate out Cloud Foundation companies from Cloud Infrastructure or Network Services companies, as they provide a fundamentally different set of products and services. In many cases these Cloud Foundation companies are already vendors to your existing data centers; transforming the way that those data centers are run, by reducing costs, and changing the required skill sets for staffing.
At the top of BTC Logic’s Top Ten list for Cloud Foundation are Red Hat, VMWare and Xen. While there are no surprises here for the top three, we had an intense debate around the final rankings. Red Hat is mostly associated with its Enterprise Linux (RHEL) product and the open source movement, and has a significant array of cloud foundation tools that work elegantly with its RHEL product suite. VMWare has recently been dominating the mindshare for anything related to virtualization of servers, and surprised even the most seasoned financial analysts with its recent stellar quarterly performance. Xen has created a tremendous buzz in the technical community with its XenServer and XCP offerings, and looks set to grow fast as part of the Citrix family.
In the final analysis, VMWare was top of the list for Q1. With its virtualization products, it is at the heart of the Cloud marketplace and hence VMWare and its growing ecosystem of support companies, like 4Base Technology, rightly topped the list. Red Hat’s enormous installed base of customers and its proven product set put it safely in second place.
How do you think these three rankings might change in the future?
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