Is the Public Cloud War Down to a Three Horse Race?
Over the past few years we have seen the EXIT of many Public Cloud Providers from pioneers such as Rackspace to most recently CISCO Intracloud . Looking back I was surprised when I heard Rackspace was quitting the Public Cloud marketplace as I thought they were one of the players who could continue to innovate and give Amazon AWS run for their money. However I was wrong, despite their fantastic support and simple pricing they were unable to keep up with innovation behind AWS. However I was not surprised to hear the exits of GoGrid, HP, Verizon, and most recently CISCO Intercloud despite their large investments and acquisitions. Why? Unfortunately they were purely focusing on trying to copy AWS, Azure or Google. If you take a look at the most recent Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant even IBM Softlayer has fallen off from visionaries to a niche players. You may ask where is Oracle in this chart? interesting question, however I am not sure if they were even included in the 2