A robust ecosystem of solutions providers is emerging around cloud computing. Here, SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal expands its list of most active players in the fast-emerging Cloud Ecosystem, from the 'mere' 100 we identified back in January of this year, to half as many again - testimony, if any further were needed, to the fierce and continuing growth of the "Elastic IT" paradigm throughout the world of enterprise computing.

Editorial note: The words in quotation marks used to describe the various services and solutions in this round-up are in every case taken from the Web sites cited. As ever we encourage software engineers, developers, IT operations managers, and new/growing companies in every case to "suck it and see" by downloading or otherwise sampling the offering in question for themselves.

(Omissions to this Top 150 list should be sent to cloud (at) sys-con.com, and we will endeavor to include them in any future revision of this expanded round-up.)

3Leaf Systems - Describes itself as a provider of "next-generation server solutions to enable cloud computing." Specifically, 3Leaf offers to help companies "achieve a terabyte of DRAM at dramatically low cost" based on low-cost commodity servers by providing virtualization of CPU and memory for an entire server farm.

3Tera - Offering what it calls "Cloud Computing Without Compromise," 3Tera enables the provision and deployment of "scalable clustered applications in minutes from anywhere in the world." The company currently has partners and is running in datacenters in seven countries (United States, Japan, Singapore, Argentina, United Kingdom, Netherlands and Serbia) on four continents (North America, South America, Asia, and Europe), with additional resources in South America and Australia soon to be available as well.

10Gen - Co-founded by Dwight Merriman, who also co-founded DoubleClick and served as its CTO for ten years, 10gen is a commercial entity offering "innovative platform technology" around  the Mongo database - an open source document-oriented database  "which makes data storage for web (and other) applications fast and easy."

Agathon Group - A dedicated grid environment that allows charitable and non-profit campaigns to scale on demand.

Akamai - Akamai claims to have been optimizing the cloud for over ten years, building a global computing platform "that helps make cloud computing a reality." Services for cloud optimization are now a vital part of the company's total offering, and go well beyond Content Delivery Network (CDN) cache-based technologies - marking Akamai's transition from CDN to full-fledged Cloud Computing player.

Amazon EC2 - When Amazon introduced its virtual computing environment, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2, "to enable you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days," it single-handedly brought Cloud Computing to the very forefront of public awareness by using Web services to provide what it called "resizeable compute capacity in the cloud." EC2 runs within Amazon's proven network infrastructure and datacenters and allows customers to pay only for what they use. See also S3.

Apache Hadoop -

Appirio - Offers services and products to accelerate the adoption of on-demand solutions, and recently secured $5.6 million of financing in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital.

Appistry - As a company that positions itself boldly "At the convergence of Grid Computing, Virtualization and SOA" Appistry offers a grid-based application platform that makes it very easy to scale-out CPU- and data-intensive applications across a virtualized grid of commodity servers. Unlike traditional grid products based on legacy scheduler technology, the company's robust "fabric" architecture has no single point of failure and "is well suited for extreme transaction processing (XTP), software-as-a-service (SaaS), cloud computing, and other data- and CPU-intensive applications."

AppNexus

Apprenda - The true power of software-based computing was realized when software developers could stop focusing on interfacing directly with hardware, and instead focus on the ingenuity of their software, say the founders of Apprenda - the company behind SaaSGrid, an operating system for building and deploying Software as a Service applications, and a platform for conducting Software as a Service business.

Aptana - Aptana has recently beta-released Aptana Cloud, which it says "is architected to complement Cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon, Google, Joyent and others." Targeted at rapid development, in particular web applications that need to scale rapidly (think Facebook applications etc.), Aptana cloud plugs into the Aptana IDE.

Arjuna - Describing its Agility offering as an "on-ramp to the Cloud [that] allows the IT department to begin to experiment with cloud computing in a gradual, incremental way, without any need for disruption to existing service," Arjuna is positioned to help IT towards a world in which internal IT infrastructure can over time be increasingly subsumed into the cloud.

Asankya -

AT&T - AT&T broke into the cloud business in August 2008 with the global launch of what it calls AT&T Synaptic Hosting - described as "a next-generation utility computing service with managed networking, security and storage for businesses."

Azure - see Microsoft

Bluewolf - A leading provider of on-demand software deployment services, Bluewolf offers remote database management and recently announced its "Arcade" cloud storage offering that allows users to economically store a virtually unlimited number of files of all sizes through the Salesforce interface.

Boomi

Box-Net

Booz Allen Hamilton - Management consultancies are also now part of the Cloud ecosystem by dint of their wide range of offerings aimed at all aspects of the phenomenon, and Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) in particular has positioned itself in the forefront the federal government's Cloud Computing initiative. According to its special Cloud Computing website. "Booz Allen is prepared to support all elements of government defense and civilian missions and migration efforts to “the cloud.” ... Booz Allen is also developing new economic analysis—addressing all cost categories for a variety of potential cloud uses—to help agencies “make the case” for migrating to the cloud."

CA - Bought the key assets - software assets and engineering team - of Cloud Computing player Cassatt in June 2009.

Callidus On-Demand SPM - see Callidus Software

Callidus Software - This leading provider of Sales Performance Management (SPM) solutions has launched Callidus On-Demand SPM, "a scalable, secure, subscriber-based model that does not require additional IT resources."

Cassatt - [UPDATE: Cassatt is no more. Its key assets were sold to CA in June 2009.] As early as 2004 Cassatt, led by visionary CEO Bill Coleman (the 'B' in BEA Systems), was outlining a roadmap to deliver on the promise of automating IT operations for on-demand computing. Its angle, Cloud Computing-wise: a focus not on public or external clouds but on 'Internal Clouds' since external cloud computing but may be ruled out due to lack of SLA control, security, and compliance, whereas Cassatt contends there is an alternative: an internal Utility Computing architecture yielding the same simplicity and economies-of-scale as an external PaaS cloud.

Cisco - By virtue of its recent acquisitions, most significantly WebEx and PostPath, Cisco is firmly on its way to joining the Cloud Crowd. “We are believers in the cloud-based delivery model for certain types of services in particular inter-company collaboration services, and that is why we got WebEx and now PostPath,” Charles Carmel, Cisco's vice president of corporate development, told Red Herring in August 2008.

Citrix

Cloud9 Analytics - Offers what is calls "the industry's first truly on-demand analytics platform" - the brainchild of CTO Scott Weiner, who views the Cloud as the ultimate data warehouse in the sky.

Cloudera - Recently co-founded by former Googler Christophe Bisciglia and others, Cloudera help its customers install, configure and run Hadoop for large-scale data processing and analysis.

Cloudscale - Cloudscale's unique patent-pending cloud dataflow technology "automatically provides the parallelism and scalability required to handle anything from one-off personal analytics agents up to the most demanding live analytics applications required by the world's leading organizations in business, web, science and government."

Cloudswitch -

Cloudworks - The goal of Cloudworks is to allow small and mid-market companies to outsource all of their computers, software, and data. Completely web-based, it works like Salesforce or Hotmail - a company's employees can log in through a web browser to access their desktop, server, software, files, email...everything.

Coghead

CohesiveFT - As the provider of what it calls 'Elastic Server On-Demand' - aimed at "enabling customers to build and manage applications for virtualized infrastructure and cloud computing," CohesiveFT's Elastic Server Platform allows users to assemble and deploy servers to Cloud Computing Platforms "in minutes." The company likes to think of Elastic Server as a Great Enabler, "allowing you to package your apps for prime time, and do it all by yourself."

Cordys - The Process Factory by Cordys is a simple, reliable and secure solution for anyone to create MashApps business processes from the Cloud - simply by mixing and matching standard business applications such as Google apps and commercially available services. MashApps can be made in minutes, without any coding. This tool has the capability to do for cloud application development environments what Visual Basic did for Windows - fast, easy, and efficient to develop and deploy bespoke applications.

Dataline - Provides cloud computing advice and expertise to the larger FSIs (i.e. Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, etc) and bundles commercial cloud computing offerings in a way that meets Federal customer requirements. Although not a product vendor, the role this company fills as a mid-level Federal System Integrator is crucial to the adoption of these technologies by the public sector.

Dell

Desktoptwo - This "Cloud desktop" offering from Sun Global Partner Sapotek describes itself as "your home in the cloud" and already claims to have users in 120 countries and a vibrant community.

ElasticHosts

Elastic Compute Cloud - see Amazon EC2

Elastic Drive - see Enomaly

Elastra - Styling itself as a provider of "Elastic Computing," Elastra offers to "design, deploy & manage database and application infrastructure in the Cloud in minutes - all with the click of a button." Dedicated to providing companies building applications with a way to radically innovate the way they develop their products and deliver them on IT infrastructure, Elastra's aim is to help a company "unlock the value of cloud computing by using virtualized hardware environments with cloud-provisioned database and infrastructure software that are easily configurable and do not require scripting, respond elastically to changing load and are delivered in the cloud with meter-based pricing."

EMC - When creating a Cloud Computing division within the company in February 2008, EMC CEO Joe Tucci delared that 85 percent of data will be managed in what he called "big, safe information repositories in the Internet ’sky,’ so to speak. We’re [talking] cloud computing..."

Engine Yard - As a company dedicated to "furthering innovation in Ruby, Rails and cloud computing," Engine Yard offers Rails-focused 24/7 operations support on top of great infrastructure to companies in search of a smooth path from 100 users to 100,000 users. In July 2008 the company closed $15 million of Series B financing led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), which included participation from Amazon.com.

ENKI - The company aim is "to allow you to focus on delivering your application to your customers while we handle the operations side: providing computing as a reliable service."

Enomaly - see Enomalism

Enomalism - Founded in November 2005 by Enomaly Inc, Enomalism - a so-called "Elastic Computing" platform - focuses on "solving the cost and complexity for enterprises that run large technical server infrastructures." Enomalism's flavor of cloud computing simplifies IT management as well as increases efficiencies of system resources. "IT administrators no longer need to install software and manually set up all the systems, but may instead use management software do this. Resources are used more efficiently because computers can be consolidated to achieve more tasks. This ensures that underutilized systems do not sit idle."

Eucalyptus

eVapt - Claims to enable "usage based monetization (instant SaaS metering) for SaaS and Cloud Computing vendors."

EyeOS -

FlexiScale - The brainchild of CEO Tony Lucas, FlexiScale is a flexible, scalable, automated hosting platform ("Cloud Computing On-Demand").

Force.com - see Salesforce.com

Fortress ITX

G.ho.st

GigaSpaces - Founded in 2000, with offices in the US, Europe and Asia, GigaSpaces allows businesses and developers "to predictably scale on-line systems under any peak demand, guarantee real-time performance under any data processing load and seamlessly leverage the economies of scale offered by virtual computing environments such as clouds and grids."

GoGrid/ServPath - Launched in 2006 as ServePath’s latest growth opportunity, GoGrid, claims the company, "delivers true 'Control in the Cloud' by combining many of the familiar features of dedicated server or managed hosting with the flexibility and scalability of cloud server hosting." In other words, with GoGrid customers can grow production servers in real time to meet demand without affecting their uptime. Provisioning and de-provisioning of servers is all done via the Internet.

Google - Without a doubt 'the elephant in the cloud' - According to this well-researched article, Google filed as long ago as February 2006 a provisional patent application with 91 different numbered claims that arguably makes it clear that Google has a multi-year lead in cloud computing.

gOS - Founded in early 2007, Good OS is an operating system software company based in Silicon Valley, California, USA and Taipei, Taiwan. Its mission is: "to enable cloud computing through software."

Hadoop - See Apache Hadoop

Heroku - According to the San Francisco-based company's founders, "Heroku means never thinking about hosting or servers again." In May 2008 they raised a $3 million round of funding for their online deployment system for Ruby on Rails apps. Heroku is a Y! Combinator start-up.

Hosting.com

HP

Hyperic - Founded in 2004, Hyperic provides complete, easy-to-use monitoring and management software for all types of web applications, including hosting it in the cloud via its CloudStatus dashboard currently in beta.

IBM - IBM approaches cloud computing "from the inside out" as it describes it. This means that Big Blue's focus is on building the most secure, efficient and resilient infrastructure for today’s organizations, and building the cloud experience as part of that infrastructure. With more than a dozen Blue Cloud Computing Centers worldwide, IBM provides cloud services, ready for use, designed to assist organizations in proving a cloud experience for their constituents. In addition, IBM is the premier company to help build an organization’s private cloud, or leverage any of the many IT services that are today provided by IBM through cloud computing, like Capacity on Demand, or the IBM Information Protection Services.

iCloud

IMOD - see Kaavo

Intel - Intel believes in Open Cloud Standards and one commentator believes there is a strong correlation between how fast cloud computing can proliferate and how well Intel plays its role to lead the open cloud solutions at IaaS and PaaS layers.

Interoute - Europe’s largest and most advanced fibre optic network, the Interoute platform operates as effectively Europe’s largest privately owned cloud.

iTricity

Joyent - The Joyent platform, which "enables teams to effectively communicate and collaborate with email, calendaring, contacts, file sharing, and other shared applications," already serves billions of Web pages every month and helped LinkedIn scale to 1 billion page views per month. Self-described as an "On-Demand Computing" provider, Joyent has developed, built and scaled some of the earliest Ruby on Rails applications – and as a result, developed a world-class infrastructure, a methodology around how to deploy and scale (both up and down) Rails applications.

JumpBox - Describes itself as a supplier of "Instant Infrastructure." Specifically, it is a ready-to-deploy virtual computer that contains a pre-configured instance of an application.

Juniper Networks -

Kaavo - provides a platform for managing distributed applications in the clouds. Kaavo’s core product, Infrastructure and Middleware on Demand (IMOD), "makes it easier for individuals and businesses to implement on-demand infrastructure and middleware and run secure and scalable web services and applications." The Kaavo philosophy is that taking a top down application-centric approach of managing infrastructure and middleware makes it easy to fully automate application lifecycle management.

Kadient -

Keynote Systems - Long a player in the SaaS space, in 2009 Keynote opened its cloud infrastructure and offered any Web team free access to KITE (Keynote Internet Testing Environment), its product for testing and analyzing the performance of Web applications across the Internet cloud. With a Web application’s performance depending on a variety of clouds’ infrastructures, ad servers and other third party content, potential pitfalls grow exponentially and Keynote contends understandably that "it’s more important than ever for Internet companies to test and measure applications to ensure a superior end user experience." With KITE, companies have free access to Keynote’s cloud infrastructure and a tool to test and monitor their applications from cities all over the world.

Layered Technologies - Offers virtualization and cloud computing systems.

LinkedIn - see Joyent

LongJump - The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution that LongJump offers is described by the company as "an on-demand platform for creating and delivering business applications to manage data, streamline collaborative processes and provide actionable analysis." The company claims that the LongJump platform has "extensive features around security access, data analysis and visualization, and process automation – all on the web."

Meeza - Qatar-based, Meeza is currently the main Cloud Services Provider within Middle East North Africa region.

Mezeo Software -

Microsoft - According to this recent article - "Microsoft's Cloud Vision is Coming Together" - Redmond's Cloud Platform vision is coming together. "Look for more information at PDC2008!" writes Microsoft Developer & Platform Evangelist John C. Stame.

Morgan Stanley -

MorphExchange

Netsuite

Ning

Nirvanix - Provider of an enterprise cloud offering that offers companies with more than 5TBs of data a highly scalable storage and delivery platform, Nirvanix has already raised more than $18 million in funding from world-class investors including Intel Capital. The company's customers include Fortune 50, media and entertainment and innovative Web 2.0 customers.

OpenNebula - OpenNebula is a widely used open-source tool for the efficient, dynamic and scalable management of VMs within datacenters (private clouds) involving a large amount of virtual and physical servers. It supports Xen, KVM and on-demand access to Amazon EC2. The tool is being used as core component in several cloud projects, such as RESERVOIR.

OpSource - Delivers a complete Web operations solution for software as a service and web companies.

Oracle -

OTOY

Parallels - Founded in 1999, Parallels optimizes computing by providing virtualization and automation software to businesses and service providers across all major hardware, operating systems, and virtualization platforms. Parallels is working closely with a network of ISVs and service providers to enable them to build their cloud computing and software-as-a-service offerings, meeting the needs of end-user organizations of all size. Parallels technology is also used by large enterprises creating their own in-house clouds.

ParaScale - "Cloud storage" involves clustering tens to hundreds of servers together to act as one giant file repository with massive capacity and parallel throughput for a variety of applications. ParaScale's software "enables the enterprise or service provider to build enormous storage pools on commodity hardware at an affordable cost."

Platform Computing - Founded in 1992, Platform is a pioneer and global leader in HPC (high-performance computing) and takes the view that there is an intersection between grid computing and cloud computing in that both cloud and grid propose an architecture that masks the complexity of managing thousands of commodity servers from their users.

Q-layer

Qrimp

Quantivo - Claims to be "revolutionizing the Business Intelligence (BI) world by combining Cloud Computing with an innovative and patented 'Affinity Analytics' technology." Company recently won the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal’s prestigious Emerging Technology Award in the Cloud Computing category.

Quickbase

Rackspace -

Red Hat - RH believes that its consistent dedication to open source and open standards will further the success of a strong cloud ecosystem. "By bringing together thousands of Red Hat-certified applications, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization we aim to deliver the next generation of computing architectures, today," says a company spokesman.

Reservoir

RightScale - The company's main offering is an automated cloud computing management system that helps companies create scalable web applications running on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Through its platform and consulting services it "enables companies to create scalable web solutions running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that are reliable, easy to manage, and cost less."

Rollbase

rPath - Founded in 2005, rPath is pioneering an approach for application distribution and management known as "virtual appliances" - which in turn are a key enabler of cloud computing. "Virtual appliances eliminate the hassles of the general purpose operating system and free vendors and customers to focus on application value instead of technology management," says the company. Virtual appliances eliminate the time consuming task of installing, configuring and maintaining complex application environments.

S3 -

SalesForce.com - has a toolkit for cloud computing development, Force.com.

Savvis - Provider of Savvis Cloud Compute, a "right-sized computing environment" launched in February 2009.

ServePath/GoGrid - Launched in 2006 as ServePath’s latest growth opportunity, GoGrid, claims the company, "delivers true 'Control in the Cloud' by combining many of the familiar features of dedicated server or managed hosting with the flexibility and scalability of cloud server hosting." In other words, with GoGrid customers can grow production servers in real time to meet demand without affecting their uptime. Provisioning and de-provisioning of servers is all done via the Internet.

SIMtone - Durham, NC based SIMtone has developed and commercialized a 'Universal Cloud Computing Platform' that allows network operators and businesses "to host, manage and quickly provision any cloud-hosted services, and ubiquitously deliver them to zero-touch terminals that can be standalone, low cost hardware appliances, or software terminals usable via browsers or on PCs, thin clients and mobile devices."

Skytap - Seattle-based Skytap's goal is "to make serving up virtual machines over the internet as ubiquitous as delivering HTML to a browser." Its initial product offering, Skytap Virtual Lab, is a hosted, on-demand service for virtual lab automation and management.

SLA@SOI - SLA@SOI's vision is "to create a business-ready service-oriented infrastructure that will empower the service economy in a flexible and dependable way."

SmugMug - Founded 5 years ago, SmuMug calls itself "the ultimate in photosharing" since it offers unlimited storage and stores backup copies of each photo in multiple datacenters. With more than 315,000 paying customers already, and 288,000,000 photos, SmugMug is a QED of cloud computing.

SOASTA - No one who heard SOASTA speak at AJAXWorld in 2007 about best practices in AJAX testing will be surprised to hear that Web testing is also at the heart of its CloudTest offering, a Cloud-based testing solution "built on the cloud to enable application testing in the cloud."

StrikeIron IronCloud

Sun - In July 2008, David Douglas was named Senior Vice President of Network.com, Sun's offering based on the Sun Grid project. Douglas is now the head of Sun's overall cloud computing initiative and his group now reports directly to Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz. ""We continue to see huge potential in the cloud space," commented Douglas as the news of his appointment was announced.

Terremark - Offering 'Enterprise Cloud' services that "let you control a resource pool of processing, storage and networking and allow you to deploy server capacity on demand," Terremark as years of experience managing complex, mission critical infrastructures and applications for leading companies around the world.

The GridLayer - see Layered Technologies

ThinkGrid -

Unisys -

Univa UD -

vCloud - see VMware

Vertica - Vertica Analytic Database for the Cloud is "an on-demand version of Vertica’s blazingly fast, grid-enabled columnar database hosted on Amazon's EC2."

Virtual Workspaces

VMware - A virtualization leader and pioneer, VMware has effectively delivered the technology that makes today’s clouds possible. With the pervasive presence of VMware in many accounts, enterprises are leveraging their virtualization infrastructure to build internal clouds, and leverage technology like VMotion to flex resources for DR or test and development to external clouds, as needed. Its vCloud initiative, says the company, "offers users of all sizes this robust and reliable platform, support for any application on or off site, and choice from over 100 service providers worldwide who deliver the cloud on VMware."

Yahoo!

Zetta - Provider of what it describes as "best-in-class NAS storage in the cloud." Zetta's founders are the team who commercialized the web as the leaders of Netscape.

Zimory - A spin-off of Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Zimory "enables dynamic, on-demand movement of applications automatically between servers in one or many locations, as well as creating the world's first marketplace for computing capacity." Based in Berlin, the company develops a dynamic infrastructure solution for data centers to create a modern Adaptive Cloud Infrastructure - "improving flexibility and reducing operating costs."

Zoho

Zuora - With its "Powering the Business Cloud" slogan, Zuora has planted its flag firmly atop the Cloud Billing mountain. The company describes its Z-Commerce Platform as "the first commerce platform for cloud developers."