By Mel Duvall

One of the challenges in understanding the rapidly evolving field of cloud computing is getting a handle on exactly what cloud computing means.

Is it application hosting, something that until recently has very much fallen under the banner of Software as a Service or SaaS? Is it hardware, such as hosted storage, or does it cover other aspects of computing such as management tools, mail services, or payment systems?

The answer, of course, is all of the above. The term cloud computing covers a very lofty space, and is getting bigger by the day.

"The bottom line is you can find a million-and-one definitions for cloud computing, partly because it is a space that's still being defined," says Jasmine Antonick, a management consultant with Dealmaker Media, a San Francisco company that works with emerging start-ups and venture capitalists.

Still, Dealmaker recently attempted to do just that—define and map the cloud computing space, by attempting to uncover the various players in the space and how they compete or work with one another. Dealmaker recently published a Cloud Computing Ecosystem Map, which details the cloud offerings of more than 100 companies, from start-ups such as enStratus and Cloudkick through to the majors like IBM, Sun Microsystems and Amazon.

"The purpose of the ecosystem map was to try to understand where all the players were playing," says Antonick. "We decided to look at all the different levels of the stack to help people understand the complete picture."

The map breaks companies into 7 categories: Clients, including browsers and mobile devices; Human Services, such as cloud consulting; Applications, covering the gamut from help-desk to customer relationship management; Integration and Middleware; Management Tools; Abstraction, which covers such areas as cloud firewalls and server virtualization; and Hardware.

One thing the map is very good at, is providing a quick impression of which companies are most active in cloud computing. IBM and Sun, for example, appear in numerous areas of the map, while HP is largely absent.

Antonick says research on the map produced several other insights.

• Venture capital interest in the "cloud" is high. While VC funding has dried up in many areas in this recession, some 25 startups in the cloud space garnered more than $150 million in VC funding in the past year.

 



• Security is under-represented. As more companies enable the building, deploying and hosting of customer data in the cloud, security will become an increasing concern.

 



• Identity management is an emerging challenge. In the last era identity management was something handled by directory service-based single sign-on systems. Several startups have emerged to tackle this challenge in the cloud.

 

Dealmaker has a conference planned for later this month that will present CIOs and venture capitalists alike with an insight into some of the emerging technologies in cloud computing. The conference, called Under the Radar, taking place April 24 in Mountain View, Calif. features about 30 cloud computing start-ups who will present their technologies and business cases to a panel of judges.

The judges, including Steve Phillpott, chief technology officer of Amylin Pharmaceuticals and Bipin Sahni, VP Technology for Wells Fargo, along with audience members, will then grill the start-ups on their plans. In the end, a winner is chosen.

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