Magic Quadrant for Web Hosting and Hosted Cloud System Infrastructure Services (On Demand)

７月に公表された、ホスティング事業のMagic Quadrantの記事。 

 

改めてみると、Rackspace等のホスティング事業者のグループとAmazon等のCloud Computing系企業がくっきり分かれていることが良く見える。 

 

 

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2 July 2009 Lydia Leong, Ted Chamberlin Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00168687   The Web hosting market is evolving rapidly and converging with cloud system infrastructure services, creating new opportunities for cost savings and business agility. These services are all unique, and vendors must be chosen with care.

What You Need to Know Web hosting is rapidly converging with cloud system infrastructure services. For the last several years, the market has been evolving toward on-demand infrastructure provisioned on a flexible, pay-as-you-go basis, but the introduction of cloud computing offerings has radically accelerated innovation in this market. The economic downturn has accelerated adoption of these offerings, thanks to the cost-savings that can be achieved by the move from physical to virtual services, and from purchasing for peak capacity to obtaining what you need only when you need it. The majority of hosting customers now obtain at least some of their infrastructure on-demand, and most new hosting contracts include on-demand services. This evolution has quickly changed the vendor landscape, bringing many new entrants to rapid prominence, as well as decreasing the relevance of hosters who have failed to make this shift. As a result of this market shift, we have changed our inclusion and evaluation criteria for the Magic Quadrant. We have based our 2009 evaluation on five use cases for hosting, all of which are made more cost-efficient by on-demand infrastructure. The use cases are: Self-managed hosting, for cost-effective agile replacement of a traditional data center. Mainstream managed hosting, for Web content and applications of low to moderate complexity. Highly complex managed hosting, for rich Internet applications. Global solutions portfolio, for a diversified set of interactive marketing needs. Enterprise applications hosting, for infrastructure underlying complex applications such as SAP. Choose a provider based on its ability to provide a cost-effective architecture and high-quality customer experience for your envisioned use case. Return to Top Magic Quadrant Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Web Hosting and Hosted Cloud System Infrastructure Services (On Demand), 2009 Source: Gartner (June 2009)   Return to Top Market Overview The Web hosting market is in the midst of business and technological transformation. Over the next five years, the cloud trait of elasticity will come to dominate this market. Although customers are, over the long term, still likely to sign multi-year commitments for managed services, the infrastructure itself will be obtained on-demand. This is a time of both great opportunities and great risks for Web hosters. New entrants are altering the landscape, and established hosters that previously lagged the market have been able to make bold investments in an attempt to catch, or even overtake, more established competitors. Hosters must execute the change to the business and technology model without disruption to their existing customer base. Many established providers are investing aggressively in technology innovation and exploitation, and we expect that some will engage in mergers and acquisitions in order to decrease their time to market and obtain engineering expertise with new technologies. No single vendor in this market does everything well. Moreover, while all vendors on this Magic Quadrant serve a global clientele, their data center footprints and locations vary significantly. As a result, it is important to match your use case with a vendor that excels in serving that particular type of need. Smaller providers may do one thing extraordinarily well, but not have a comprehensive set of services that lets them serve a broad array of use cases. More than ever before, it is crucial to look beyond the Magic Quadrant Leaders when selecting a vendor. The vendor that is perfect for your needs may be a Niche Player. Return to Top The Top Five Use Cases Gartner has observed five main use cases for hosting among our client base. We have evaluated each provider on all five of these use cases, in order to produce a composite rating for each. The use cases are as follows: Self-managed hosting. This customer seeks self-provisioned, self-managed, cost-effective infrastructure, as an alternative to buying his own equipment and placing it into co-location or into his own data center. This may serve basic needs such as test and development environments, but may also serve highly complex applications that the customer wants to self-manage. On-demand hosting provides cost savings, capacity flexibility, rapid provisioning, simplified configuration and management, and ease of automation. Mainstream managed hosting. This customer has Web content and applications with low to moderate complexity, scale and rate of change. This may include sites of a primarily informational nature, such as corporate websites and interactive marketing, as well as dynamic applications such as intranet portals, collaboration, supply chain management and eCRM. It may also include modest-scale e-commerce and hosting for small software as a service (SaaS) vendors. On-demand hosting provides cost savings through virtualization and reduction of over-provisioning. Highly complex managed hosting. This customer has a rich Internet application with a high degree of complexity and rate of change, plus the need for highly scalable, flexible capacity. This includes highly dynamic sites such as complex e-commerce, SaaS applications, online gaming and "Web 2.0" businesses. On-demand hosting provides cost savings through reduction of over-provisioning, and handles the need for business agility via near-instant scalability. Global solutions portfolio. This customer is a global company that needs a complete set of solutions, at multiple price points, for a large number of customer-facing websites. Most customers of this type are consumer packaged goods companies who need interactive marketing and e-commerce solutions. On-demand hosting provides cost savings and flexibility through both technical and business efficiencies. Enterprise applications hosting. This customer seeks hosting of complex enterprise software, such as SAP and the Oracle E-Business Suite, or has other complex enterprise data center replacement needs. This is a lower-level service than data center outsourcing or application-specific services such as Infrastructure Utility for SAP (IU4SAP); it does not include application management or other specialized needs such as SAP Basis support. Rather, the hoster simply provides, and may manage, the underlying systems infrastructure. On-demand hosting provides cost savings via automation and simplified configuration and management. Return to Top Market Definition/Description The term "Web hosting," as used in this Magic Quadrant, refers to a specific set of products and services: dedicated hosting, utility hosting, virtual data center hosting (VDC hosting) and cloud hosting. Many of the providers also offer colocation. These services are defined as follows: Colocation includes Internet data center facilities, plus options such as remote hands and network bandwidth. Dedicated hosting includes facilities and network, plus dedicated server hardware. Managed and professional services may be optionally included. Utility hosting includes facilities, network and storage, plus a utility computing platform. This must be a shared environment using hypervisor-based virtualization, offering on-demand, flexible capacity. This may be offered in conjunction with dedicated infrastructure. Managed and professional services may be optionally included. VDC hosting is an outsourced "semi-private cloud" service, including facilities, network, storage and a multitenant utility computing platform that provides graphical user interface (GUI)-based self-administration. Cloud hosting includes facilities, network, storage and on-demand, multitenant elastic computing capacity, which can be either dedicated or virtualized. "Elastic" means that customers must be able to scale both up and down on demand, without a contractual commitment to capacity. Managed and professional services may be optionally included. Hosting, as used in this Magic Quadrant, is distinct from both data center outsourcing and remote infrastructure management. The services are productized and standardized, although customization is available. There is no transfer of either assets or personnel, and the service is always offered in the hoster's data center. The term "on-demand hosting" refers to utility hosting, cloud hosting and VDC hosting. These services are defined in greater detail in "Web Hosting and Cloud Infrastructure Prices, North America, 2008." The term "cloud infrastructure services" refers to cloud hosting and VDC hosting. These services constitute the cloud system infrastructure component detailed in "Forecast: Sizing the Cloud; Understanding the Opportunities in Cloud Services." In this Magic Quadrant, we evaluate these providers as Web hosters. If you are using this Magic Quadrant to evaluate cloud providers for other uses, such as scientific computing or other applications not based on Web technologies, the self-managed hosting use case will be the most similar to your needs, but you are likely to have requirements beyond the scope of that use case. Managed services include management of components such as: the server operating system; Web servers, application servers and database servers; storage, including backup and recovery; security; and other network devices, such as application delivery controllers. Professional services include architecture, capacity planning, performance testing, security auditing and assistance in migrating from another hosting provider or from an internal data center. Some customers choose a fully managed service, in which the Web hosting provider manages everything except the application code. Others prefer to choose from a menu of a la carte management services; for instance, some need just database administration services, while others want junior-level systems administration tasks like patch management handled for them but want to do all the complex work themselves. Also, the number of customers who want to self-manage is increasing rapidly; these IT managers want to take advantage of the cost efficiencies of a provider's scale and automation tools, but do not want to relinquish control. Your choice should depend upon your needs and IT capabilities. Return to Top Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria To appear in this Magic Quadrant, vendors had to meet the following criteria: They must sell on-demand hosting as a stand-alone service within data centers they own or lease, without the requirement to bundle it with application development, application maintenance or other outsourcing. This service must be productized and available to the general public. Their services must be enterprise-class, offering 24/7 customer support (including phone support), service-level agreements and the ability to scale an application beyond the capacity of a single server. They must have significant market presence, as indicated by Web hosting revenue of at least $100 million in 2008, or on-demand hosting revenue of at least $20 million. Their hosting services must interest Gartner clients, Gartner analysts feel clients should take note of them, or they must regularly compete against offerings from other vendors represented on the Magic Quadrant. They must have referenceable customers in North America, Western Europe and Asia. Return to Top Vendors Considered, but Not Included Some providers did not qualify for this Magic Quadrant due to their inability to demonstrate sufficient revenues to qualify for inclusion, or because their services did not meet our definitions for hosting. Below, we indicate some of the vendors we considered, but were not able to include. Return to Top DataPipe DataPipe is a rapidly-growing provider of colocation, dedicated hosting and utility hosting. It is of increasing interest to Gartner's clients, who primarily consider it for cost-competitive, low-complexity environments that require management only through the operating system layer. Return to Top EngineYard EngineYard specializes in managed, on-demand, Ruby on Rails hosting. It is covered in "Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing System and Application Infrastructure, 2009." Return to Top Google Google's App Engine offering is a cloud application infrastructure, not a cloud system infrastructure. It does not provide generic virtualized servers; it is a sandboxed, restricted application environment for Python or Java. Return to Top Microsoft Microsoft's Azure Services Platform is a cloud application infrastructure, not a cloud system infrastructure. Return to Top ThePlanet ThePlanet is a rapidly-growing provider of colocation and dedicated hosting to small and midsize businesses. In the last year, it has begun to target enterprise customers with its NorthStar managed hosting offering. Return to Top Voxel Voxel offers dedicated hosting, cloud infrastructure services and content delivery network (CDN) services. It is covered in "Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing System and Application Infrastructure, 2009." Return to Top XCalibre Communications XCalibre is a U.K.-based provider of dedicated hosting. Its FlexiScale division offers cloud hosting, and it frequently competes with providers such as Amazon and GoGrid (previously ServePath) in Europe. Return to Top Added Amazon Joyent Layered Technologies Media Temple OpSource Quality Technology Services GoGrid (previously ServePath) SoftLayer Return to Top Dropped NTT America NTT fragments its hosting offerings across multiple geographies, rather than having a unified set of global offerings. Moreover, it does not offer on-demand hosting, although it does offer colocation and dedicated hosting. NTT does plan to eventually offer utility hosting. Return to Top Qwest Qwest does not offer on-demand hosting, nor does it have such offerings on its product road map. It does offer colocation and dedicated hosting. Return to Top Verizon Business Verizon offers colocation and dedicated hosting, and since the beginning of June, a VDC hosting offering called Computing as a Service. Verizon originally planned to launch this offering in early 2008, but had to delay due to technical difficulties; thus, we were not able to evaluate the service for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant. Return to Top Evaluation Criteria Ability to Execute The most heavily-weighted criteria for a Web hoster's ability to execute are service offering and service excellence, as reflected in the customer experience with sales, support and operations. Overall business viability, as reflected in the ability to service a three-year contract without significant disruption, and the service provider's track record, also contributes to this rating. We have considered each vendor in the context of all five use cases. Different traits are important in each use case; for instance, the quality of the self-service portal is of high importance in self-managed hosting, while proactive support and skilled project management are very important for highly complex managed hosting. For details of all evaluation criteria, see "Decision Framework for Web Hosting and Cloud Infrastructure Services (On-Demand)." Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria Evaluation Criteria Weighting Product/Service high Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization) standard Sales Execution/Pricing standard Market Responsiveness and Track Record standard Marketing Execution low Customer Experience high Operations standard Source: Gartner Return to Top Completeness of Vision The Web hosting market is undergoing rapid evolution. Consequently, it is vital that Web hosting companies understand the future needs of customers, have a realistic road map for the transition to cloud infrastructure, and are able to exploit new technologies in innovative ways. The full context of the vendor's vision is also important, since cloud concepts may pervade their entire business. We also evaluate the vendor's approach to growing their business, including their strategy for marketing and sales, international expansion, and vertical market solutions. We have considered each vendor in the context of all five use cases. Different traits are important in each use case; for instance, the road map for rapid adoption of new technologies is very important for highly complex managed hosting, while the road map for developer and partner tools is very important for self-managed hosting. For details of all evaluation criteria, see "Decision Framework for Web Hosting and Cloud Infrastructure Services (On-Demand)." Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria Evaluation Criteria Weighting Market Understanding high Marketing Strategy standard Sales Strategy standard Offering (Product) Strategy high Business Model low Vertical/Industry Strategy low Innovation high Geographic Strategy standard Source: Gartner Return to Top Leaders Leaders have proven they have staying power in this market, can frequently innovate on their existing products and can be relied on for enterprise hosting needs. They have proven their technical competence and ability to deliver services to a wide range of customers. They address multiple use cases well. New managed hosting customers should sign two-year contracts with these companies. Satisfied customers renewing a contract with one of these firms should sign a three-year deal. Self-managed hosting should be bought on-demand, or on contracts of one year or less. Return to Top Challengers Challengers have a track record of delivering good service capabilities, but serve a narrower range of use cases, and face challenges in expanding to serve additional use cases. New managed hosting customers should sign two-year contracts with these companies. Satisfied customers renewing a contract with one of these firms should sign a three-year deal. Self-managed hosting should be bought on-demand, or on contracts of one year or less. Return to Top Visionaries Visionaries have an innovative and disruptive approach to the market, but their approach causes them to deliver services in ways that enterprise hosting customers are not yet accustomed to. Visionaries typically serve one use case well, and are trying to expand their expertise so that it is applicable to the other use cases. Because the business of Visionaries can change radically over a short-term period, we recommend that customers buy these services on-demand, or on contracts of one year or less. Return to Top Niche Players Niche Players are typically specialists with more limited product portfolios, or emerging vendors. They may serve one use case particularly well, and may be better than a more generalized vendor in their area of specialty. New and renewing customers of stable, narrowly-focused Niche Players should sign a two- or three-year contract. New and renewing customers of emerging Niche Players whose businesses are still rapidly evolving should buy services on-demand, or on contracts of one year or less. If you are using managed services, be wary of making short-term, tactical choices as it can be inconvenient and expensive to change Web hosting providers. Return to Top Vendor Strengths and Cautions Amazon Strengths Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) has revolutionized the market for hosting services with granular, by-the-hour pricing for virtual servers. It also has a CDN service coupled with its S3 storage service. Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominate the public perception of cloud infrastructure services. Amazon is innovative and extraordinarily agile, responding rapidly to customer demands for features, rather than following a set product road map. An ecosystem of third-party vendors offer tools and services that extend the capabilities of Amazon's platform. Also, Amazon has extensive partnerships with software vendors, who provide prebuilt packages (Amazon Machine Images) for the EC2 environment. Recommended use cases: self-managed. The AWS offerings encompass both cloud system and application infrastructure. Each service should be evaluated separately; customers can adopt individual services without needing to use the others. Return to Top Cautions Support is a paid feature, and while it is responsive and expert, it is primarily geared toward technically knowledgeable users. Amazon does not offer managed or professional services. Amazon cannot provide private connectivity, private VLANs or "hybrid cloud" solutions. Amazon does not allow third-party audits of its infrastructure, although it does plan to obtain SAS 70 certification for its data centers. Amazon meets enterprise needs such as invoices on a one-off basis. It does not normally customize terms and conditions. Return to Top AT&T Strengths AT&T offers a wide range of Web-hosting services, typically priced at a slight premium. Its Synaptic Hosting utility platform is competitively priced. AT&T has very strong technical competence, reflected in both solutions engineering and operations. AT&T has one of the better customer service portals. AT&T has a substantial global data center footprint, as well as a global content delivery network. AT&T has the broadest and deepest cloud computing vision of any carrier. It has an ambitious and comprehensive road map of services that are highly integrated with its network capabilities. Recommended use cases: self-managed; mainstream managed; highly complex; global portfolio; enterprise applications. Return to Top Cautions Customer service has improved significantly in the last year, but is still highly variable in quality. AT&T is often inflexible in both sales and service, and support is primarily reactive. The sales process can be difficult, complex and slow. Customers who need to connect their hosted infrastructure to a non-AT&T network should obtain a written agreement of cooperation from AT&T. Return to Top CSC Strengths CSC offers managed hosting services at average prices. Its roots as a full-service IT outsourcer result in a depth of services, including vertical application support, staff augmentation offerings and a broad, deep suite of security offerings. CSC has made significant investments in virtualized platforms and utility computing services, including a unique and innovative workflow-driven provisioning system for cloud infrastructure. CSC has made significant strides in improving the quality of its products and customer service portal, and its future road map is ambitious. Recommended use cases: mainstream managed; enterprise applications. Return to Top Cautions Quality of account management depends on customer size and location. Communications between different operation and product groups can be poor, leading to tasks "falling between the cracks." CSC is a fast follower rather than a technology innovator. Return to Top GoGrid (previously ServePath) Strengths GoGrid (previously ServePath) offers colocation, managed hosting, CDN services and a Xen-based self-managed cloud hosting service called GoGrid. Its prices are very competitive. The GoGrid service offers a 100% uptime service-level agreement and highly responsive customer service. GoGrid has a productized "hybrid cloud" offering, combining GoGrid virtual servers with dedicated database servers, colocation space and private connectivity. GoGrid has a clean, attractive, easy-to-use Web-based user interface. GoGrid has pursued interoperability as a key strategy. Its provisioning application programming interface (API) is supported by third-party tools, such as RightScale. It also plans to offer its technology as a managed service within the data centers of partner service providers and individual customers. Recommended use cases: self-managed; mainstream managed. Return to Top Cautions Although GoGrid has multiple data centers, the GoGrid service is currently only available in its San Francisco data center. GoGrid will be available in Europe by the end of 2009. GoGrid's primary competition is Amazon's EC2, and GoGrid faces considerable challenges in matching Amazon's pace of innovation and easy access to capital for infrastructure build-out. Return to Top IBM Strengths IBM offers very high-end managed hosting services. It excels in delivering complex configurations, especially those requiring additional IT services. IBM can provide excellent application hosting and management for ERP, CRM and other complex environments. IBM offers a component-based utility hosting platform, as well as public cloud system infrastructure services such as Computing on Demand for scientific computing and similar needs, and Information Protection Services for cloud-based business continuity. Recommended use cases: highly complex; global portfolio; enterprise applications. Return to Top Cautions IBM's services are highly customized, resulting in high prices and lengthy sales cycles. IBM hosting contracts are lengthy and complex, and frequently include inflexible terms and conditions that shift the risk onto the client and away from IBM. Service-level agreements are customized to each individual contract. Cloud contracts are shorter, simpler and more standardized. IBM uses partners to deliver smaller configurations, which increases client communication issues and impairs quality control. IBM has a comprehensive strategy for cloud computing, across its many lines of business. IBM's cloud system infrastructure services road map is primarily focused on private clouds. Although IBM is launching innovative public cloud services, such as test-cloud services aimed at developers that include Rational tools and Jazz integration, these services are adjacent to the specific hosting use cases evaluated in this Magic Quadrant. Return to Top Joyent Strengths Joyent provides on-demand, cost-competitive virtual servers called Accelerators. It can provide physically dedicated Accelerators, as well as colocated equipment, to customers who have specific needs for such servers. Joyent's technology stack includes numerous technologies from Sun, including Solaris Containers and ZFS. Joyent's strategy for scaling infrastructure emphasizes the role of network elements, particularly application delivery controllers from F5 Networks (hardware) and Zeus (software) Recommended use cases: self-managed. Return to Top Cautions Joyent's support, while very responsive and highly expert, is reactive. It offers managed services on a time and materials basis. Joyent's professional services are limited and focused on high-scalability projects. Joyent sells primarily online. Rather than field sales, it relies on software vendor and integrator partnerships to reach enterprise customers. Although Joyent plans to expand globally, it currently only has data centers in the U.S. Return to Top Layered Technologies Strengths Layered Technologies' competitively-priced service offerings include dedicated hosting as well as VDC services based on 3Tera's AppLogic and Parallels' Virtuozzo Containers, and Microsoft Hyper-V-based utility hosting. Its managed services are offered in tiers. Layered Tech's customer service is relatively responsive and proactive, compared to other providers of self-managed and simple managed hosting. Layered Tech has invested substantially in automation, and offers fast provisioning as well as API accessibility. Recommended use cases: self-managed; mainstream managed. Return to Top Cautions Layered Tech is in the midst of a business transformation focused on moving the company up-market. Layered Tech currently primarily serves the small and midsize business (SMB) segment, not the enterprise. Layered Tech's lack of brand awareness and sales presence places it at a competitive disadvantage in the market. Layered Tech's large menu of service offerings can create buyer confusion. Return to Top Media Temple Strengths Media Temple has a diverse but integrated product portfolio that spans shared, virtual private and dedicated hosting, with an upgrade path between them. Media Temple's competitively-priced services are usually bought on-demand, without a contract. Media Temple understands its core target market of interactive agencies, advertising agencies, media companies and social media publishers. Recommended use cases: self-managed. MediaTemple should also be considered for marketing micro-sites where low-cost elastic scalability is a requirement. Return to Top Cautions Media Temple offers managed hosting (which it brands "cx") to a limited number of customers, seeking a closer partnership with the customer's IT staff. Media Temple's technology platform is built on top of Parallels, limiting its attractiveness to enterprise customers. Media Temple experienced recurring outages with the first generation of its "gs" shared hosting service. This service has since been re-architected; new customers are provisioned on the second-generation service. Media Temple only has data centers in the U.S. Return to Top NaviSite Strengths NaviSite's diverse product portfolio addresses both infrastructure and application management needs. It also offers a content delivery network. Its prices are average. NaviSite has an innovative, specialized product road map that takes advantage of the company's application management capabilities. NaviSite's cloud computing strategy is based on its AppStructure platform, which encompasses not only VMware-based infrastructure, but also collaboration and integration capabilities. Recommended use cases: mainstream managed; highly complex; global portfolio; enterprise applications. Return to Top Cautions NaviSite's complex product portfolio can confuse the buying process. NaviSite's marketing and sales presence is limited and hinders the company when competing against larger, more established providers. NaviSite's only non-U.S. data center is in the U.K. NaviSite is a moderate-size provider, and is trying to spread its resources over a very broad set of service offerings. Return to Top OpSource Strengths OpSource has been focused solely on SaaS enablement. Its competitively-priced services are specifically targeted at SaaS provider needs, although it plans to expand into more general cloud infrastructure offerings. OpSource provides adjunct services to SaaS providers, such as an on-demand billing platform, integration services (branded "OpSource Connect"), custom application management and help desk support. Recommended use cases: SaaS infrastructure (mainstream managed and highly complex hosting). Return to Top Cautions OpSource's quality of service delivery and support is inconsistent. The more customized the solution, the greater the challenges encountered in delivery. OpSource has experienced recent outages due to its storage fabric. It has since re-architected its storage services. OpSource is expanding into general cloud infrastructure services, but to date, its offerings have been focused on a narrow market segment. OpSource's only non-U.S. data center is in the U.K., although it can offer services across a broader footprint via its partnership with NTT. Return to Top Quality Technology Services Strengths Quality Technology Services offers wholesale and retail colocation, managed hosting (including a utility hosting platform, "QVI"), and media services, at very competitive prices. Quality Tech grew through the acquisition of ITC Deltacom's eDeltacom business, IBM's colocation business and Globix's hosting business. It is an IBM partner for SMB hosting; IBM is a key channel, and extends Quality Tech's capabilities. Recommended use cases: self-managed; mainstream managed. Return to Top Cautions Quality Tech only has data centers in the U.S. Quality Tech's product road map is very conservative. The company invests in technologies once they have achieved widespread mainstream adoption. Quality Tech's customer portal has only basic functionality. Return to Top Rackspace Strengths Rackspace offers managed hosting and cloud infrastructure services at competitive prices. It also has a Limelight Networks CDN partnership that can be used in conjunction with its cloud storage service. Rackspace has industry-leading customer service. It is proactive, highly responsive and "high touch," interacting frequently with its customers. Rackspace has a broad and ambitious cloud road map which integrates the full range of its service offerings. Rackspace has particularly strong support for open source technologies. Recommended use cases: self-managed; mainstream managed; highly complex; global portfolio. Return to Top Cautions Rackspace's sales and support quality has become inconsistent, due to its extremely rapid growth. Rackspace is at its best when it is delivering formally productized offerings, not one-off customized arrangements. Although Rackspace is a strong player in the enterprise segment, its product portfolio, professional services and customer portal are more limited than those of other leading providers. Although Rackspace is a global provider, it has a limited geographic footprint in North America. Return to Top Savvis Strengths Savvis offers a broad range of hosting services, including a VMware-based utility platform called "Dedicated and Open Cloud Compute" (formerly Virtual Intelligent Hosting). Its services are priced at a slight premium. Savvis's quality of sales and service delivery is good. It is very good at exploiting technology and has an excellent customer service portal. Savvis has an ambitious road map for cloud infrastructure offerings, as well as SaaS-enablement services that include a marketplace and other complementary services. Savvis is particularly strong in the financial vertical, for which it offers specialized products and services that take advantage of its network. Recommended use cases: self-managed; mainstream managed; highly complex; global portfolio; enterprise applications. Return to Top Cautions Savvis's customer service has improved recently, but it must demonstrate that these improvements are sustainable. Savvis has rationalized its product offerings, but the breadth of options can still lead to buyer confusion. Savvis has refocused its sales force on selling managed hosting, rather than colocation, but colocation remains a distraction for its sales team. Return to Top SoftLayer Strengths SoftLayer offers fast-provisioned dedicated and Xen-based cloud hosting at competitive prices. It also has an Internap CDN partnership that can be used in conjunction with its cloud storage service. SoftLayer has an extensive product road map. It includes many value-added services with all configurations, such as TippingPoint-based intrusion prevention and distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation, and local and global load-balancing. SoftLayer has an extensive customer portal with an array of tools for self-management of both dedicated and virtual devices. Functionality can also be accessed via an API. SoftLayer uses its wiki to provide thorough, well-organized documentation. Recommended use cases: self-managed. Return to Top Cautions SoftLayer does not offer any managed services. Its customer support does not hand-hold; customers are expected to be technically proficient and willing to read the documentation. SoftLayer does not allow hardware exceptions to its standard configurations. SoftLayer sells primarily online. It engages in very limited marketing and sales, and has little brand recognition. Return to Top SunGard Strengths SunGard Availability Services has deep and broad expertise in business continuity, but also has a significant colocation and managed hosting business. Its prices are average. SunGard is very process-oriented and highly conscious of enterprise security requirements. SunGard continues to expand and improve its product portfolio, and can capably manage a broad range of requirements. Recommended use cases: mainstream managed; enterprise applications. Return to Top Cautions SunGard's customer service processes can result in a "hot potato" scenario between multiple operations groups, where no one accepts responsibility and accountability for solving the customer's problem. SunGard is presently transforming its customer service model to address these issues. SunGard can be inflexible, and sometimes struggles to manage high-growth, high-change environments. SunGard's near-term cloud infrastructure road map is primarily focused on business continuity capabilities, although it will be expanding into other cloud compute services. Return to Top Terremark Strengths Terremark is a leader in virtualized, VMware-based infrastructure services, with its Infinistructure utility hosting and Enterprise Cloud VDC offerings. It also offers carrier-neutral colocation. Its prices are average. Terremark is a technology innovator with very good customer service, a good customer portal and extensive automation. It has a well-thought-out and aggressive cloud infrastructure road map that is focused on enterprise requirements. Terremark offers superb engineering support. It is willing to take on "bleeding-edge" technologies, legacy infrastructures and other unusual requirements. Terremark is particularly strong in the government vertical. Its "NAP of the Capital Region" data center is specialized for serving U.S. federal government needs. Recommended use cases: self-managed; mainstream managed; highly complex; global portfolio. Return to Top Cautions Although Terremark is a global provider, it has a limited geographic footprint in North America. Terremark's service portfolio is not as broad as its largest competitors. Return to Top Disclaimer SunGard is a portfolio company of Silver Lake Partners, an investment firm that also owns a substantial, publicly disclosed interest in Gartner, Inc., and has two seats on Gartner's 10-member Board of Directors. Gartner research is produced independently by the Company's analysts, without the influence, review or approval of our investors, shareholders or directors. For further information on the independence and integrity of Gartner research, see "Guiding Principles of Independence and Objectivity" on our website, www.gartner.com . Return to Top The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2 July 2009 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. © 2009 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction and distribution of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Although Gartner's research may discuss legal issues related to the information technology business, Gartner does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.

 

GoGrid's John Keagy on Cloud Pricing

ServePath/GoGrid社のJohn Keagy氏とのインタビュー。

 

同氏は、自社のCloud Computingサービスである、GoGridの状況について説明。

- Web2.0系の顧客も多いが、Enterprise顧客も増加しており、特に、開発、テスト、QA環境としてCloud Computingを効果的に利用するケースが非常に多くなっている。 

- 競合がひしめく中、Cloud Computingの価格はどんどん下がっていく、と予想してる。 

- 世界中のIT予算はどんどん少なくなっていく、と予想する。  Cloud Computingの浸透がこれに大きく寄与する、と考えている。 今まで高額な人件費やシステムリソース費がどんどん、自動化技術や、安価なCommodity HWの採用に沖が得られている。 

- Cloud Computingが中々成長していかない要因の一つとして、企業内のIT部門の抵抗があるから。  自分のキャリアに対する脅威として移っているケースを良く見ている。  しかし、時代の流れには逆らえない、と考えている。 

 

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ServePath/GoGrid founder and CEO John Keagy was among the speakers at the recent Cloud World/Open Source World conference. Video blogger Barton George caught up with John at the show to discuss some of his views on the industry, including his expectation that the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) space will see prices drop as the competition heats up. This view is interesting in light of the subsequent launch of vCloud Express, in which several VMware partners are offering IaaS services at or below Amazon's pricing. This video runs about 6 minutes.

Terremark's vCloud Express in Spotlight

Terremark社がVMWorld 2009にて自社のCloud Computing環境、vCloud Expressを発表。 

 

このビデオで実際にシステムを一分以内に構築できるデモを見せている。 

 

Cloud Computing環境を主として開発、テスト向けに安易に構築できる環境として位置づけ、システムの本格稼動は同社のホスティングサービス、もしくは企業内のインフラに移行できるようなサポートも行っている。 

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Terremark (TMRK) was featured in the opening keynote of VMworld 2009 on Tuesday and VMware CEO Paul Maritz showcased its new vCloud Express, a service to create and host virtual machines on VMware vSphere. In this video from VMworld TV, Terremark's Simon West discusses his company's implementation of vCloud Express and gives a quick demo of setting up a virtual server. Users can launch a single server and pay by credit card, with rates starting at less than $1 a day. This video runs about 2 minutes, 30 seconds.

For additional video,

Carpathia Hosting Acquires ServerVault

Carpathia Hosting社が、同業のServerVault社を買収、両社ともに政府関連に強いホスティング事業者であり、今後の成長戦略に拍車がかかる模様。 

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Carpathia Hosting has acquired its northern Virginia neighbor ServerVault, the companies said Wednesday, combining two providers with strong records in providing secure hosting and regulatory compliance for enterprise and government customers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

"We're putting together two very strong, very profitable companies, which were already poised for success," said Carpathia Hosting CEO Peter Weber. "The combination of five years of organic growth and this acquisition positions Carpathia Hosting as one of the fastest growing companies in the hosting industry."

Carpathia is based in Ashburn, Va. and operates 10 data centers across the United States, while ServerVault has its headquarters and data center in Dulles. Both companies do about 40 percent of their business with government agencies, and focus on "high touch" managed hosting services.  The acquisition comes 15 months after Spire Capital acquired Carpathia Hosting and began expanding its data center footprint.

Focus on Compliance Expertise
Today's acquisition provides additional expertise in regulatory compliance, an area where ServerVault has built a strong practice. "ServerVault is recognized as the leading provider of highly-secure and compliance-centric hosting services," said Jon Greaves, the CTO of Carpathia. "We are very excited to build on this foundation and add Carpathia's rich services portfolio and data center footprint."

Savvis Previews Next-Gen Cloud Offering

Savvis社が自社のCloud Computingサービス、Project Spiritを提供開始。  CiscoとVMWareの技術を駆使してインフラを提供する。 

3つのレベルのサービスを提供する事を発表しており、そのうち一つは、Amazon Web Servicesに近い安価なメニューになる、との事。 

 

Amazon Web Servicesと競合しないことを強く訴えており、よりエンタプライズ向けのサービスを協調している。 

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Cloud computing for the enterprise is becoming more stratified. Savvis Inc. sees the breadth of approaches to the cloud as an opportunity, and is crafting its new  infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering with three tiers of pricing and features - all powered by the latest technology from Cisco and VMware.

The new platform, known as "Project Spirit," is being announced today at VMworld 2009 in San Francisco. Savvis will launch a beta in the fourth quarter of this year, with general availability in 2010. The service is being billed as a"virtual private data center" that is a leap forward from Savvis' initial foray into the cloud in February.

Powered by Cisco and FCoE
The new platform will be powered by Cisco's Nexxus 5000 and 7000 switches and use a unified network fabric running over Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). Savvis, which was an early adopter of Cisco's Nexxus line, will also use VMware's vSphere hypervisor and Cisco Nexxus 1000 virtual switches.   

Although high-end hardware and software will power Project Spirit, Savvis is offering three levels of plans, ranging from a top tier for the most stringent enterprise requirements to a bottom tier with pricing and features optimized for testing and development projects - the types of services currently being run on Amazon Web Services. The company is describing the service levels as being defined by quality-of-service (QoS).

Cloud Economics 101 Part 4, Amazon EC2 vs Terremark vCloud Express

Terremark CloudサービスとAmazon Web Serviceの価格比較。

Terremarkがかなり安い事が興味深い

 

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The recent announcement of the Terremark Cloud offering has raised significant attention especially because of the competitive pricing and EC2 like features of elastic capacity and hourly charges with no commitment. On the surface the Terremark entry price of $0.036 per hour seems very low compared to Amazon EC2 at $0.10 but it's worth picking a few examples to provide a more apples to apples comparison.

..
Not included in the comparison is the difference in storage costs which can be small or very significant depending on the circumstance. Amazon provides up to 160 GB of instance storage for a small image or 850 GB for a large included in the hourly cost. If you have only a small instance say 10GB that adds $ 2.50 to the monthly price at Terremark ( @ .25/GB ) however of you needed the 850 GB included in the Amazon Large image that would add $ 212 to the monthly Terremark costs. Also not included is bandwidth costs, however both charge the same $0.17 GB for data transfer out . ( Although Amazon charges $ 0.10/GB for data in vs Terremark $ 0.17 data in ).

Some the bigger differences will more likely depend on how the VMs are utilized. The numbers stated above assume a full month of 24x31 operation. With Amazon EC2 it's possible to save in S3 ( bundle in Amazon terms ) an instance and then shut down ( terminate ) the VM and the billing stops. With Terremark however although you can shut down the VM, the hourly charges do not stop. Only deleting the VM ends the billing, there does not appear to be an option of saving with the hourly charges turned off and allowing a new instance from the saved image to be started at a later time. This appears to be a big advantage for Amazon although I need to learn more about the Terremark offering to fully appreciate the capabilities.

Certainly economics is not the only factor in selecting a Cloud infrastructure provider. Vendor Lock-in and VM portablity often come up as concerns. Security is also a factor in regard to Cloud computing and this was a motivator for Amazons recent Virtual Private Cloud offering which provides a dedicated VPN connection from a customer premise to an isolated Cloud inside the Amazon infrastructure. I also have to admit I was impressed with a recent tour of the Terremark data center in Miami , this place was like a high tech Fort Knox when it came to security. The entire topic of Cloud security is worthy of specialized consideration not covered in this simple comparison.

Ease of use is another consideration that is worth evaluating. The Amazon Web Console is limited in function but easy to use plus includes access to many partner and community provided ( including Citrix C3 Lab ) templates that are prebuilt and ready to launch. In Amazon EC2 for example its now possible signup and launch your own XenApp server in as little a 15 minutes.

Terremark also provides a web base console that looks straight forward however I have not used it myself yet. Terramark does not provide the same portfolio of 3rd party templates however they do provide more granularity in the size of VMs and RAM plus they offer multiple versions of Windows Server.

As the options for Cloud Computing continue to expand the economic analysis of Cloud vs Premise will extend to Cloud vs Cloud, as Service Providers continue to provide dynamic cloud type offerings.

Cloud Economics 101 Part 1 - Premise vs Cloud vs Colo
Cloud Economics 101 Part 2 - Premise Plus Cloud
Cloud Economics 101 Part 3 - Amazon Reserved Pricing

http://twitter.com/chrisfleck

Xen.org Project Launches New Open Cloud Initiative a?“ blog.xen.org

Xen.org社が自社のクラウドソリューションとして Xen Cloud Platformを発表。

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Introduction of Xen Cloud Platform Will Accelerate Customer Adoption of Open Enterprise-Class Cloud Infrastructures

SAN FRANCISCO » 8/31/2009 » Xen.org, the home of the open source Xen hypervisor, today formally announced the Xen® Cloud Platform (XCP) initiative – a powerful new community-led effort to build on the growing leadership of the Xen hypervisor in today's cloud, and deliver a secure and proven open source infrastructure platform for the federated cloud services of tomorrow. The Xen Cloud Platform will accelerate the use of cloud infrastructure for enterprise customers by providing open source virtual infrastructure technology that makes it easy for service providers to deliver secure, customizable, multi-tenant cloud services that work seamlessly with the virtualized application workloads customers are already running in their internal datacenters and private clouds, without locking them into any particular vendor.

"The Xen Cloud Platform raises the bar – going beyond the hypervisor to deliver a complete run-time virtual infrastructure platform product that virtualizes storage, server and network resources," said Mark Bowker, analyst, ESG. "This announcement aligns the Xen community around a common compatible product, increasing the opportunity for value-added offerings from all ISVs, while promising to run VMs from any hypervisor."

The low cost and rapid development benefits of the open source model, coupled with its proven security, performance and customizability, made Xen the hypervisor of choice for many cloud computing pioneers. The widespread adoption of Xen in today's most successful commercial cloud offerings led the community to formalize the Xen Cloud Platform to further accelerate this growth in an open, non-proprietary way. This initiative enables open source contributors and consumers to come together around a more focused effort to deliver a complete Xen-based infrastructure product that supports a wide variety of current and future cloud scenarios.

"The Xen Project has played a seminal role in enabling the creation and rapid adoption of virtualization," said Ian Pratt, creator of Xen and founder of Xen.org. "Today Xen is already the most widely used hypervisor in the service provider market and the community will be able to build on this momentum to develop a complete, open source, cloud-optimized Xen virtual infrastructure platform. Our goal is to empower providers to offer a rich set of services that will catalyze cloud adoption by the enterprise in a way that's open, accessible and non-proprietary."

A key focus of the XCP initiative will be to provide technology that permits easy interoperability between internal enterprise "private clouds" and leading external cloud platforms like Amazon EC2,  Rackspace Cloud Servers and GoGrid. The Xen Cloud Platform will accelerate the development of a wide variety of key technologies and standards that address this need in an open, non-proprietary way, including:

• Broad interoperability across disparate virtualization platforms – Through standards such as the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Open Virtualization Format (OVF), virtual appliances will be packaged in a hypervisor-independent format for easy transport between internal and external clouds with no proprietary vendor lock-in.
• Support for new and existing applications – Existing applications currently running in enterprise datacenters will be enabled to run in Xen-based cloud platforms without modification. This flexibility will allow users to choose where each application should run based on business needs rather than limitations of the technology or proprietary requirements of their current virtualization or cloud vendor.
• Federated computing capacity – With federated private and public clouds, the process of moving application workloads between virtual datacenters and disparate cloud service providers will be simplified.
• Standardized virtualization management – Support for DMTF standards will allow complete open management of virtual infrastructures.
• Rich virtual networking capabilities – A powerful open virtual switch will make it easy for cloud providers to add sophisticated network service offerings, including per-tenant network management, intrusion detection, firewalling, routing, and load balancing.
• Cloud-scale virtual storage infrastructures – Advanced storage features required by enterprise workloads will enable virtual machines and their physical storage to be widely separated without disrupting application performance.

"Rackspace is very excited about the direction and scope of the Xen Cloud Platform," said Lew Moorman, president and chief strategy officer, Rackspace. "We have built our Cloud Servers offering on the Xen platform and are experiencing strong customer interest in this new model of hosting. The cloud will not only reduce the cost of computing but also provide instantaneous access enabling customers to improve the speed of business. It is very exciting and encouraging to see Xen.org put the full weight of the community behind the development of a cloud platform."

The Xen Cloud Platform will address the needs of cloud providers by combining the isolation and multi-tenancy capabilities of the Xen hypervisor with enhanced security, storage and network virtualization technologies to offer a rich set of virtual infrastructure cloud services.  The platform will also address user requirements for security, availability, performance and isolation across both private and public clouds. The project will not attempt to develop new, independent management and orchestration offerings since this is an area with existing rich offerings and active ongoing development in the community, including open source options from the Eucalyptus Project and OpenNebula.org, as well as solutions from cloud provider and commercial virtualization vendors.

The Xen Cloud Platform will combine the mobility and openness attributes of the Xen virtualization platform with innovative storage, security and network virtualization technologies already under development as part of Xen.org. As a result, the new platform will not only address cloud provider requirements around security and isolation, but will also meet next-generation user requirements for security, availability, performance, isolation and manage between on-premise and off-premise infrastructures.

Xen.org Advisory Board Members Voice Support
Xen.org advisory board members such as Citrix, HP, Intel, Novell and Oracle have already voiced their support for the XCP initiative:

"As a Xen.org advisory board member and frequent contributor, Citrix fully supports this expansion in scope for the Xen community," said Peter Levine, senior vice president and general manager, Datacenter and Cloud Division, Citrix Systems (NASDAQ:  CTXS). "Starting with the core Xen platform five years ago, the Xen Client Initiative (XCI) in 2008 and now the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) initiative, the open source value proposition of reliability, security, scalability and unbeatable economics now extends from the desktop to the datacenter and cloud. Citrix is excited to contribute to this project and looks forward to working with all the beneficiaries – service providers, businesses and consumers of cloud-based resources alike – to provide cloud services that are open, interoperable and free from proprietary vendor lock in."

"Organizations are turning increasingly to virtualization to help them reduce operating costs," said Nick van der Zweep, director of Virtualization and Insight Software at HP.  "With the Xen Cloud Platform, customers will be able to leverage HP infrastructure and enable open source virtualization for clients, clouds, and servers. This will provide a platform for innovation, facilitating an infrastructure that provides organizations with increased flexibility and improved levels of service while reducing costs."

"Extending the capability of Xen.org with the Xen Cloud Platform initiative builds on the great foundation that we have in place today for creating and building solid capabilities for enterprise class clouds," said Doug Fisher, vice president and general manager, Systems Software Division, Intel. "This is an important step in unlocking innovation across all disciplines of cloud computing."

"As an active member of the Xen open source project, Novell is excited to participate in the Xen Cloud Platform initiative," said Carlos Montero-Luque, vice president of business and product management for Open Platform Solutions at Novell. "Novell is committed to an open source model that thrives on the support and contributions of a strong community. Creating a stable, well-defined public API for Xen will help drive its rapid adoption inside the enterprise and in clouds."

"Oracle continues to provide leadership and contributions to Xen.org, and is committed to the broad availability of a complete open source virtualization platform, independent of any OS," said Wim Coekaerts, vice president of Linux engineering, Oracle Corporation. "Aligning the community around a single compatible code base will maximize the benefits of open source virtual infrastructure for customers, and simplify the federation of private and public clouds."

For a list of additional supporting quotes from Xen community supporters, please see the end of this announcement.

Today's announcement builds on Xen.org's leadership in the virtualization community.  In 2008, Xen.org expanded its charter and community effort with the addition of the Xen Client Initiative (XCI), which led the community to offer the first complete embeddable client hypervisor ready for consumption by ISVs and OEMs. The success of the XCI model, combined with strong demand in cloud computing and demand from key service providers, has now led the community to further expand the Xen.org charter to include the new Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) initiative to accelerate open source development of a complete cloud-optimized virtual infrastructure product. These expansions have driven a renewed commitment to Xen with more than 250 leading companies regularly contributing to the projects and contributions jumping over 110 percent year over year. This continued investment has enabled Xen.org to continue to accelerate the pace of innovation in the core of the datacenter, on client devices and now into the cloud.

About The Xen Project and Xen.org
Xen.org is the home of the open source Xen hypervisor, a fast, secure industry standard code base for operating system virtualization. Founded and led by Ian Pratt, the community benefits from the contributions of senior engineers from leading hardware, software, and security vendors. Xen.org is run for the benefit of the community by the Xen Project Advisory Board, which is drawn from leading contributors to the project. For more information, visit www.xen.org.

Forward-Looking Statements Disclosure
This release contains forward-looking statements which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The forward-looking statements in this release, including without limitation statements made by representatives of contributors to Xen.org, do not constitute guarantees of future performance. Investors in contributors to Xen.org are cautioned that statements in this press release, which are not strictly historical statements, involve risks that could cause actual results to differ materially, including risks associated with the demand for cloud services, the uncertainty inherent in developing cutting-edge technology, the failure to coordinate and manage contributions to Xen.org, competition from alternative cloud infrastructure providers, the voluntary nature of contributions to Xen.org, the level of resources made available to Xen.org by contributors to Xen.org as well as other risks detailed in any public statements or filings by Xen.org or any contributor to Xen.org. Neither Xen.org nor any contributor to Xen.org assumes any obligation to update any forward-looking information contained in this press release or with respect to the announcements described herein.

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Xen® is a trademark of Citrix Systems, Inc.  and/or one or more of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.  All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Supporting Quotes
AMD – "AMD congratulates the Xen community for launching the Xen Cloud Platform and providing the industry options for IaaS deployments," said Earl Stahl, vice president of software development, AMD. "We believe that choice and interoperability are key in continuing to build cost-effective and enterprise-ready cloud computing and virtualization technology. We applaud Xen.org on its commitment to flexibility and openness and look forward to continuing our work with the Xen Project to help bring more economical and scalable cloud technology to the enterprise."

Carpathia –  "Carpathia has been working to take advantage of the capabilities the Xen platform provides to deliver Carpathia InstantOn™, our enterprise cloud computing platform," said Jon Greaves, CTO of Carpathia Hosting, a leading provider of hosting services for enterprise and Federal customers. "Our ability to take the foundation provided by Xen and extend it to deliver unique services is helping accelerate adoption of cloud solutions for enterprise and Federal customers. The Xen Cloud Platform will further enhance this foundation with a set of technologies purposely built to support the demands of our customers."

Cloudera – "The Xen hypervisor has been widely used in enterprise data centers because of its clean hardware abstraction for elastic, scalable distributed systems," said Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera. "That has made it a good foundation for our customers doing large-scale data analysis using the Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop. The Xen Cloud Platform initiative is a great next step in making an open source cloud platform for the enterprise a reality."

Dell – "Dell and Citrix are committed to accelerate cloud computing by providing innovations in IT infrastructure," said Andy Rhodes, head of Data Center Solutions Marketing, Dell. "Together we are helping customers use virtualization in every area of IT – from the desktop to the datacenter and into the cloud. The Xen Cloud Platform will provide business model flexibility and a fresh approach for delivering IT as an infrastructure service."

Eucalyptus Systems, Inc. – "Eucalyptus provides open source private cloud software that will be easily combined with the Xen Cloud Platform to allow anyone to implement an 'Infrastructure-as-a-Service' cloud," said Dr. Rich Wolski, CTO and co-founder of Eucalyptus Systems, Inc. "The rich feature set added to the Xen platform makes it suitable for enterprises and service providers as a key enabling technology for building on-premise clouds."

Fujitsu – "Fujitsu highly appreciates the openness of Xen and has been contributing to the Xen community over the years," said Chiseki Sagawa, president of the SOP Strategy and Development Office at Fujitsu. "We welcome the new Xen Cloud Platform which will be a great value for us to enhance our Trusted-Service Platform for cloud computing services."

GoGrid – "GoGrid delivered the world's first cloud supporting the instantiation of both Linux and Windows and we did it using the Xen hypervisor," said John Keagy, GoGrid CEO. "We are still the only cloud supporting Windows 2008 and Xen continues to meet all of our needs. The Xen Cloud Platform will deliver an exciting tool for the enablement of both public and private clouds and the resulting interoperability will help accelerate the adoption of cloud infrastructure."

HyperStratus – "An open source-based complete cloud offering is a huge benefit to all participants in the cloud ecosystem – enterprises, software vendors, and cloud providers," said Bernard Golden, CEO, HyperStratus. "The vision of bridging an internal Xen-based cloud to public cloud providers enables cost-effective scaling while increasing choice and flexibility."

Juniper Networks – "Juniper is committed to delivering a Cloud Computing Infrastructure that is based on an open, standards-based network architecture with the flexibility to support fully converged and virtualized data center environments," said David Yen, executive vice president and general manager, Data Center Business Group at Juniper Networks. "Xen.org shares the same commitment toward open standards and the Xen Cloud Platform will speed innovation, integration and interoperability so customers can maximize the potential of cloud computing."

NetApp – "Working closely with the industry's leading IT vendors, NetApp provides enterprise customers and service providers with the solutions and infrastructure needed to enable the cloud, such as secure multi-tenancy, transparent data motion, service automation, storage efficiency, and integrated data protection," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing for NetApp. "NetApp is committed to bringing the same level of capabilities to the open source Xen Cloud Platform."

SoftLayer – "SoftLayer has relied on Xen to make great strides in providing customers a dynamic, manageable and cost effective cloud infrastructure that offers a rich set of enterprise services," said Sean Charnock, vice president of business development  at SoftLayer. "Formalizing the already progressing work of the community into the XCP will provide a solid springboard for innovation in cloud computing and only speed the rate we can leverage our expertise in on-demand data center services to provide cutting edge cloud computing."

VA Linux Japan – "As experts in solving problems in the areas of open source operating systems and virtualization technology, VA Linux Japan will work with the Xen.org community to promote and enhance the activities of the Xen Cloud Platform," said Iehisa "Ike" Nakamura, president and CEO, VA Linux Japan. "Backed by our technical skills, expertise and considerable experience in all areas of software development, we are committed to supporting the development of the open source based cloud development services in Japan."