| Amazon |
Cloud offering: Amazon Web Services, a half-dozen services including the Elastic Compute Cloud, for computing capacity, and the Simple Storage Service,
for on-demand storage capacity.
How Amazon got into cloud computing: One of the largest Web properties in existence, Amazon always excelled at delivering computing capacity at a large
scale to its own employees and to consumers via the Amazon shopping site. Offering raw computing capacity over the Internet was perhaps a natural step
for Amazon, which had only to leverage its own expertise and massive data center infrastructure in order to become one of the earliest major
cloud providers.
|
 |
|
|
| Google |
Cloud offering: Google Apps , a set of online office productivity tools including e-mail, calendaring, word processing and a simple Web site creation tool;
Postini, a set of e-mail and Web security services; and the Google App Engine, a platform-as-a-service offering that lets developers build applications and
host them on Google's infrastructure.
How Google got into cloud computing: Google Apps was the company's attempt to branch out beyond the consumer search market and become a player in the enterprise.
Google unveiled the enterprise version of Apps in February 2007 in a competitive strike against rival Microsoft, and followed up by releasing App Engine in
April 2008. |
|
|
|
| Microsoft |
Cloud offering: Azure a Windows-as-a-service platform consisting of the operating system and developer services that can be used to build and enhance Web-hosted
applications. Azure is in beta until the second half of 2009.
How Microsoft got into cloud computing: Microsoft made its name by developing the operating system for home and work computers. But with all forms of applications
moving to the Web-hosted model, it's no surprise Microsoft would make Windows available over the cloud. Microsoft also provides a set of business services over the
Web, including Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications Server, CRM and Live Meeting. |
|
|
|
| Salesforce |
Cloud offering: Salesforce.com's flagship is a set of CRM tools including salesforce automation, analytics, marketing and social networking tools. A second major
offering is Force.com, a platform for building Web applications and hosting them on the Salesforce infrastructure.
How Salesforce.com got it start: Benioff founded Salesforce.com with the goal of creating an information management service that could replace traditional business
software technology, the company says. Initial funding was provided by investors including Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. |
|
|
