Cloud.com Scores A Big Win With GoDaddy

GoDaddy, the domain registrar, yesterday unveiled their cloud plans with a goal to eat into the public cloud pie. They are calling their service Data Center On Demand and it is currently in limited release phase. It is generally expected to be available in July. Unlike Amazon Web Services, GoDaddy’s plans requires customers to have a base service involving monthly, yearly or multi-year subscription and any additional resources are available on-demand with a pay as you go option. As far as I am concerned, GoDaddy’s cloud plans are just their attempts to get on to the cloud bandwagon and not particularly attractive for me. What excited me was the news that the underlying cloud platform is Cloud.com’s CloudStack.

According to Derrick Harris at GigaOm,

GoDaddy’s cloud uses Cloud.com’s CloudStack private-cloud software for the resource-orchestration layer, making it one of many service providers white-labeling the Cloud.com product.

This announcement comes after their previous announcement about Tata Communications using Cloud.com for their public cloud services. Cloud.com is, clearly, having tremendous momentum in the service provider market which, so far, is not matched by other players in the space. They are also getting traction in the enterprise space with one big customer being Zynga (their Z-Cloud is built using CloudStack) but they are the ones to beat in the service provider market. However, it will be interesting to see the competition with OpenStack once the compute part of OpenStack matures and gets adopted left and right.

Let me take this chance to list out other players in the space

• Eucalyptus: A company that started off as an offshoot of an academic project is in the market as a private option to Amazon Web Services with a strong focus on the enterprise market. They are increasing their focus in the Asian market this year
• OpenStack: The open source alternative to Eucalyptus (which uses open core model) started by Rackspace and NASA with support from companies like Cisco, Citrix, Dell, etc.. This project garners the most buzz and there are widespread expectations that it will take off in a big way
• Cloupia: One of the comprehensive solutions I have seen in the private cloud space with an integrated management layer that helps to manage across physical, virtual and cloud resources. The breadth and width of their features (both enterprise & service provider focussed) are impressive but they relatively unknown in the market compared to others
• Hexagrid: Another relatively unknown company focussed on delivering infrastructure services through channel partners. One thing that attracted me to look at their technology is their claim that service providers can offer cloud services at half the cost of AWS
• Enomaly: One of the oldest in the space focussing on service providers. After the initial buzz they had before other players entered the space, they seem to be getting some traction in China now and their SpotCloud offering is an interesting concept polished out of Zimory’s idea
• 3Tera: 3tera, before its acquisition by CA, was having traction among the service providers. After the acquisition, there was some silence and people started wondering about CA’s plans. It turns out 3tera is still an important part of CA’s cloud strategy and expect to hear from them more and more in the coming years

There are other players in the space but I am just focussing on handful of Cloud.com competitors in this post. We are working on a research report which, once it is ready, will offer a more comprehensive take on the market segment.

Disclosure: I have informally offered some advise to Cloupia on their go to market strategy and have no financial relationship with them