Who's Who Among Cloud Startups

Cloud computing startups offer software developers and IT departments a growing menu of services and tools for configuring, deploying, and managing applications outside of the corporate data center and, in some cases, in "private clouds" behind the firewall. In addition to the eight cloud computing startups profiled in this report, here are 12 others every IT professional should know.

Coghead
Application development and hosting, also called platform as a service (PaaS), offered from Amazon Web Services. Includes authoring, workflow, and data integration capabilities. Founded 2003.

Enomaly
Enomalism 2.0 elastic computing platform provides open source application development and deployment capabilities that can be used, among other things, to move virtual machine images to and from Amazon EC2 servers. Founded 2004.

Heroku
Provides a Ruby on Rails development and hosting service, still in beta testing, based on Amazon's EC2. Founded 2007.

Hyperic
CloudStatus performance monitoring service is in beta. It monitors the performance of applications in Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine. Founded 2004.

Intridea
Based on Amazon's EC2, Scalr is an open source hosting environment with pre-built images for load balancers, databases, and application servers. Founded 2006.

Joyent
Offers servers, storage, and other on-demand virtual infrastructure, called Accelerators, from its own data centers. Founded 2004.

Layered Technologies
Provides on-demand dedicated servers in a variety of configurations running Linux, Solaris, or Windows, plus Microsoft Hyper-V virtual servers as a hosted service. Founded 2004.

Mosso
A division of Rackspace, Mosso competes with Amazon's EC2 in offering Web application hosting with on-demand compute cycles, disk space, and bandwidth. Founded 2006.

ParaScale
ParaScale's Cloud Storage software creates a clustered storage environment on Linux servers for public or private clouds. Founded 2004.

Relationals
Offers an application hosting service called LongJump. A new Java-based development suite can be used to develop applications that are hosted on LongJump. Founded 2003.

10Gen
Linux-based grid management software that includes an object database, application server, and SDK. Also hosts the apps. Founded 2008.

3Tera
AppLogic grid operating system runs on commodity servers connected via Gigabit Ethernet and can be used for public or private clouds. Founded 2004.

Illustration by Nick Rotondo

20 Cloud Computing Startups You Should Know

Young companies are emerging as software and service providers in the cloud. These newcomers can help you deploy and manage IT resources in new ways.

Elastra: A Dual-Purpose Server Kaavo: Cross-Vendor Cloud Control Nirvanix: Beyond Online Storage Engine Yard: Cloud Takes On A Ruby Hue		Appirio: Front Lines Of Cloudsourcing RightScale: Fine-Tuning The Cloud Skytap: Virtual Software Testing CohesiveFT: Servers As A Service
Who's Who Among Cloud Startups