Enterprise Cloud Computing

The cloud computing ecosystem consists of infrastructure vendors, cloud builders and managers, technology vendors, and prepackaged application vendors.

Infrastructure Vendors

Infrastructure vendors provide computational resources such as servers, storage, bandwidth, and deployment environment that are available for use to anybody wishing to utilize them.

Cloud Builders and Managers

The Cloud Builders and Managers help with configuration of the hardware and software computing resources available from the infrastructure vendors as well as managing them (or “building around” their current shortcomings).

Technology Vendors

Technology vendors provide sophisticated virtualization and highly parallel deployment technologies.

EMC(VMWare division), Parallels, Citrix, RedHat are some of the vendors who provide such technologies.

Prepackaged Application Vendors

Though cloud computing is intended for hosting custom-built applications, some vendors allow customization of already available pre-packaged applications.

Salesforce allows CRM aplications to be customized with add-on components and deployed over its cloud computing infrastructure. Google provides Google Data APIs to interact with the applications deployed over Google’s cloud platform. Microsoft provides Exchange Online services though no interaction with these services via APIs is possible yet.