The 50 Coolest Software-Defined Data Center Vendors Of 2022

From AWS and Microsoft Azure to Flexential and Vapor IO, here are the 50 hottest IT companies leading the software-defined data center market in 2022.

CRN’s list of the top 50 software-defined data center IT companies is becoming more complex as consolidation pushes more vendors into the space, and those downstream customers increasingly rely on technology that has been shaping the enterprise for the past decade.

Merger activity has been a good bellwether in the software-defined space. For instance, VMware stayed on its own for all of six months this year before it was offered a $61 billion deal its board could not refuse.

Meanwhile, chipmakers whose speed and power are still needed as the engine behind the promises of the cloud, are still struggling to catch up with a market demand that has been a boon to revenue, but has left the global supply chain depleted of the all-important computer component.

The birth of the multi-cloud concept where workloads can exist, communicate with each other, scale and move at will, is giving developers new goalposts, and sales teams more business values to put in front of customers.

While application builders are bringing larger, more complex data sets to create machine learning models that enable multi-cloud, the processing, storage, security and power demands of these enterprise workloads are only getting bigger. As a result, storage and power supply companies are just as interwoven into this economic architecture as the software vendors who created it.

Additionally, the lessons vendors learned during the COVID-19 pandemic around securing and provisioning thousands of remote environments through the cloud are not going away, as the work-from-home movement that was largely enabled by the data center, has not abated as quickly as the virus that caused it.

The 10 Software-Defined Cloud Vendors

The cloud is just someone else’s data center. Here are the cloud vendors who are bringing the best solutions to bear for the data center.

The 10 Software-Defined Data Center Vendors

These are the companies shaping the future of what data center looks like, its capabilities, and the opportunities for partners.

The 25 Software-Defined Infrastructure Vendors

It’s dangerous to go alone. Here are the infrastructure vendors that give software defined infrastructure its framework.

The 5 Software-Defined Chip Makers

The smaller players such as ARM and Marvell are putting pressure on their giant rivals such as Intel and AMD. Here is a breakdown.