Appirio, a company that helps enterprise customers leverage PaaS cloud platforms such as Salesforce.com and Google Apps, put a nice interactive navigator on their website.
The Appirio cloud computing ecosystem map aims to provide more clarity in the fast evolving cloud services market. It tries to help enterprise decision makers to accelerate their adoption of the cloud by trying to provide a standard taxonomy.
Ryan Nichols, head of cloud strategy at Appirio, states: “The cloud ecosystem is evolving so quickly that it’s difficult for most enterprises to keep up. We created the ecosystem map to track this evolution ourselves, and have decided to publish it to help others assess the lay of the land. With broader community involvement, we can create a living, breathing map where anyone can access, drill down and interact with dynamic information. This will bring some much-needed clarity to the cloud market.”
Unfortunately, since the map is geared towards the enterprise customer it ignores all of the innovation that is taking place in the mashup, programmable web, and mid-market products. Given the new ways in which the cloud enables new application architectures and services, the enterprise market is the worst indicator of the evolving cloud ecosystem.
