Virtually every vendor has a cloud story to tell. But here are 10 companies that have distinguished themselves as the leaders in cloud computing, either by being first to market, by offering the broadest and deepest set of cloud services or by taking a leadership role in the cloud revolution. Other articles in this issue of Enterprise Cloud Services:

1. Amazon: The IaaS gold standard

The online retailer came out of nowhere in 2006 to offer up idle compute cycles as a service. Since then, it seems like there’s no market Amazon is unwilling to enter and no competitor it’s unwilling to take on. There’s the market setting Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). If you’re a third-party provider of cloud services, that’s the platform you need to be compatible with. Over time, Amazon has added multiple cloud storage offerings and is moving into the PaaS market. The company is also selling tablets (Kindle Fire) and challenging Apple and Google in the cloud-based music arena. Continue reading “10 most powerful cloud companies” →