When I was invited to co-chair the upcoming Under the Radar conference, my team and I were tasked with trying to understand the entire cloud ecosystem so we could distill it down into one day at the event. How does everyone fit into the stack? Where's the overlap? I wanted to help cut through the noise and bring some clarity to the cloud. I started by reviewing many of the early attempts that had been made to explore the cloud ecosystem so far. I have included a number of those links here below but if I have missed any critical examples, let me know and I will update this post:

• Peter Laird and Kent Dixon's industry map
• Christofer Hoff's Version 1.4 Ontology Map
• OpenCrowd.com's Cloud Taxonomy
• The 3 layer model such as the one offered up by Michael Sheehan at GoGrid
• Sam Charrington's slide deck on the 3 layer model
• Robert W. Anderson's cloud services stack model
• Matias Woloski's Animated SaaS Taxonomy Map
• John M. Willis for his early (and frequent) contributions
• James Urquhart' and David Berlind's whiteboard!
• Randy Bias "Defining Infrastructure Clouds"
• Jean-Lou Dupont's excellent Wikimap

In reviewing these documents, I had two needs that were not being addressed:

First, I wanted to understand how all of the various companies related to each other so I could see what companies were doing.

Second, I wanted to be able to identify what opportunities there were for new startups.

To address the first issue, I began with the work done by the authors above, and built on that to create this worksheet.

How to Use The Map:

To use the map, you may start at any given layer and read across to see which companies have offerings that address that layer. Or you may find a company on the top row and read down to see which aspects of the stack they address.

I have organized the companies along the top in rough order based on their "stack depth", meaning, how much of the stack they covered or how far they are ahead in the cloud computing game at this point in time.

As I was building it out, it became quite obvious that may of the traditional vendors such as Microsoft, Sun, HP, IBM, and others have the requisite pieces to build nearly vertically integrated stacks. Once I ran out of vertically integrated vendors, I began to sort them by where their offerings appeared in the stack. These point solutions build out the scattergraph waterfall on the right hand side of the document.

Using the Map to Identify Opportunities:

Following Terry Matthew's "checkerboard model", it should be easy going forward to find logical areas that need to be built out. Think about it as "X for the cloud". For example, identity management from the last era was mostly LAN/WAN-based single-sign on and directory service based. "Identity for the cloud" is a logical hole to fill and sure enough, that is what Symplified is aiming to do.

Or to take another example, we can look at Management tools. First there were tools to manage real infrastructure. Then those tools morphed into virtualization management tools. Now they must evolve again to help system administrators manage their infrastructure across both their on-premise real and virtual servers but also their cloud-based infrastructure - "Management tools for the cloud."

There are opportunities galore for companies to rethink and re-envision all of the layers of the stack for this next generation of Everything as a Service. Can you think of some opportunities? Leave them in the comments and I will add them to the next version and highlight them as layers that need more attention.

Cloud Collaboration - Expanding the Map:

Thanks to all of you above who have contributed to the discussion so far, particularly Peter and Kent for their industry map from which I extracted my groupings. This is just the version 1.0 of this document. Let's keep working on this. If any of you wish to collaborate, let me know by contacting me at troy at dealmakermedia dot com or simply add your comments below. I will continually update the document and release newer versions of it as it develops.


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Cloud Computing Ecosystem Map v1.0

Troy Angrignon is Co-Chair of the 13th Under the Radar conference (April 24, 2009) put on by Dealmaker Media . In one day, Under the Radar will uncover the best of breed startups in Cloud, Virtualization, IAAS, PAAS, SAAS - showcasing the best companies from around the globe. Register now to see the cloud ecosystem come together with all its players under one roof.