Companies to Watch: Public Companies
Name: Adobe, www.adobe.com/products/air
Market Cap (in billions): 15.8
Cloud Products: AIR, LiveCycle ES Developer Express
Notable Acquisitions and Partnerships: None
Major Customers: eBay, New York Times, Time Warner
Market Position: Lets programmers develop cloud-based applications that can use local computing resources when needed.
Name: Akamai, www.akamai.com
Market Cap (in billions): 3.8
Cloud Products: EdgeComputing, Web Application Accelerator, NetStorage, Global Traffic Manager
Notable Acquisitions and Partnerships: OpSource
Major Customers: MySpace, HP
Market Position: Rapidly remobilizing its content delivery network for cloud computing.
Name: Amazon, aws.amazon.com
Market Cap (in billions): 37.4
Cloud Products: Amazon Web Services
Notable Acquisitions and Partnerships: Amazon has made venture investments in Engine Yard and Elastra
Major Customers: Linden Lab (Second Life), Washington Post
Market Position: Offers à la carte computing power, storage, and Web content delivery.
Name: Google, www.google.com/a
Market Cap (in billions): 137.4
Cloud Products: Google Apps (Gmail, Google Docs), App Engine
Notable Acquisitions and Partnerships: Postini
Major Customers: Genentech, University of Arizona, city government of Washington, DC
Market Position: With the launch of App Engine, developers can use Google’s infrastructure to host and maintain their own applications.
Name: IBM, www.ibm.com/cloud
Market Cap (in billions): 143.5
Cloud Products: Computing on Demand
Notable Acquisitions and Partnerships: Outblaze
Major Customers: Indigo BioSystems, Elizabeth Arden, United States Golf Association, University of Pretoria
Market Position: Its 10 global cloud-computing labs let businesses tap into IBM’s computing power and expertise in building and managing data centers.
Name: Intel, www.intel.com
Market Cap (in billions): 92.1
Cloud Products: Xeon 5500 processor, Data Center Manager, Node Manager
Notable Acquisitions and Partnerships: None
Major Customers:
Market Position: Recently released Xeon 5500 processor could dominate the huge data centers that will be built as cloud computing expands.
Name: Rackspace, www.mosso.com
Market Cap (in billions): 1.3
Cloud Products: Mosso Cloud Sites, Cloud Files, Cloud Servers
Notable Acquisitions and Partnerships: Slicehost, Jungle Disk
Major Customers: Razorfish, Radio Flyer
Market Position: Its cloud-computing division, Mosso, is promising more reliability, better support, and less downtime than main competitor Amazon Web Services.
Name: SalesForce.com, www.salesforce.com/platform
Market Cap (in billions): 4.8
Cloud Products: Force.com
Notable Acquisitions and Partnerships: InStranet
Major Customers: Harrah’s Entertainment, Japan Post, New Jersey Transit
Market Position: With Force.com, the company has created a platform that lets a business’s IT staff build and host applications using the company’s infrastructure.
Name: Sun, www.sun.com/solutions/cloudcomputing
Market Cap (in billions): 7.82
Cloud Products: Sun Open Cloud Platform, Sun Cloud
Notable Acquisitions and Partnerships: Q-layer
Major Customers: None yet; product launching in beta this summer
Market Position: Promising a set of open APIs, the company is launching cloud storage and computing services later this year.
Name: Yahoo, research.yahoo.com/cloud_computing
Market Cap (in billions): 22.7
Cloud Products: Yahoo Small Business, Zimbra
Notable Acquisitions and Partnerships: Zimbra
Major Customers: Comcast, H&R Block, UCLA
Market Position: Its popular Web applications and open-source projects keep the beleaguered company in the picture.
Read more:
Keep Reading
Most Popular
Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.
And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.
The problem with plug-in hybrids? Their drivers.
Plug-in hybrids are often sold as a transition to EVs, but new data from Europe shows we’re still underestimating the emissions they produce.
Google DeepMind’s new generative model makes Super Mario–like games from scratch
Genie learns how to control games by watching hours and hours of video. It could help train next-gen robots too.
How scientists traced a mysterious covid case back to six toilets
When wastewater surveillance turns into a hunt for a single infected individual, the ethics get tricky.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.