The 20 Coolest Cloud Infrastructure Companies Of The 2021 Cloud 100

The coronavirus pandemic fast-tracked cloud infrastructure spending, with organizations turning to the scalability and services of cloud platforms to meet changing requirements in a locked-down world. Here are 20 cloud infrastructure companies with public and private cloud offerings to watch in 2021.

The coronavirus pandemic fast-tracked cloud infrastructure spending, with organizations turning to the scalability and services of cloud platforms to meet changing requirements in a locked-down world relying on remote work, education, entertainment, medicine and shopping.

The acceleration of cloud migrations and cloud infrastructure projects is expected to continue once the pandemic subsides, driving IaaS and PaaS spending.

Amazon Web Services leads public cloud providers with a 33 percent market share, according to Synergy Research Group. AWS increasingly has been positioning itself for a hybrid cloud world that extends its reach into customers’ data centers, most notably with AWS Outposts.

Rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, meanwhile, have adopted hybrid and multi-cloud stances for customers that need to maintain on-premises infrastructure and those that don’t want to go all in with a single cloud vendor.

Here’s a look at the 20 cloud infrastructure companies with public and private cloud offerings to watch in 2021.

Alibaba Cloud

Daniel Zhang

Chairman, CEO,Alibaba Group

Alibaba Cloud leads China’s cloud services market and trails Amazon Web Services in the overall Asia-Pacific region. It revamped its hybrid cloud strategy last year and launched a new partner program to accelerate enterprise cloud adoption. It also pledged $283 million toward joint partner solutions and a three-year, $28 billion cloud infrastructure investment.

Amazon Web Services
Andy Jassy
CEO

Amazon Web Services dominates the public cloud space with a 33 percent market share that eclipses its next two competitors combined. It’s pushing further into hybrid cloud with smaller AWS Outposts formats, more AWS Local Zones and Amazon Elastic Container Service Anywhere and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Anywhere.

Cisco Systems
Chuck Robbins
Chairman, CEO

Cisco Systems is transitioning the bulk of its portfolio to an as-a-service consumption model as it shifts from hardware to software, services and subscriptions. A restructuring is projected to save $1 billion and allow it to focus on cloud, applications, SD-WAN and emerging technologies, including 5G and artificial intelligence.

Dell Technologies
Michael Dell
Founder, Chairman, CEO

Dell Technologies is doubling down on consumption-based, as-a-service offerings with Project Apex and Dell Technologies Cloud, its flagship hybrid cloud product. It’s making heavy investments in building new 5G infrastructure and edge computing solutions and expects to spin-off of VMware, its majority-owned virtualization and emerging hybrid cloud software unit, this year.

DigitalOcean
Yancey Spruill
CEO

Niche cloud provider DigitalOcean caters to developers with IaaS and PaaS solutions. It launched a virtual private cloud last year that’s designed for enhanced security for private networking services, and its new app platform is a PaaS offering that automates infrastructure management.

Google Cloud
Thomas Kurian
CEO

Google Cloud’s momentum is driven by its data processing and analytics strengths and its multi-cloud strategy that includes its hybrid and multi-cloud Anthos platform. The No. 3 cloud provider continues its enterprise push with industry-specific vertical offerings such as Lending DocAI, Cloud Healthcare API and Recommendations AI.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Antonio Neri
President, CEO

Revenue returned to pre-coronavirus revenue levels with a fourth-quarter rebound for the edge-to-cloud, Platform-as-a-Service company. HPE moved its pay-per-use GreenLake channel model to a standardized group of 17 “building block” cloud service offerings to simplify time to value and market. It also finalized the $925 million acquisition of SD-WAN leader Silver Peak.

IBM
Arvind Krishna
CEO

Under new leadership, Big Blue plans to split into two companies with a spin-off of its Global Technology Services’ managed infrastructure services unit into a new publicly traded company by the end of 2021. IBM will focus on hybrid cloud computing and digital transformation, while “NewCo” will focus on managing customer-owned IT infrastructure.

Lenovo
Yang Yuanqing
Chairman, CEO

A 34 percent jump in Lenovo’s cloud service provider segment drove its fiscal second-quarter data center growth, thanks to a richer mix of offerings and wins supported by its in-house design and manufacturing. Software-defined infrastructure revenue grew 22 percent. Lenovo promised an aggressive as-a-service strategy for channel partners in 2021.

Lumen Technologies
Jeff Storey
President, CEO

Lumen’s platform combines its global fiber network infrastructure, edge cloud capabilities and security and communication and collaboration solutions. The former CenturyLink has changed its Channel-Integrated Engagement Policy to improve its direct sales team’s collaboration with solution provider partners, while significantly boosting the latter’s payouts for new sales.

Microsoft
Satya Nadella
CEO

The number of petabyte-scale workloads running on Microsoft Azure has more than doubled. The No. 2 cloud provider continues to expand its hybrid portfolio with new tools such as Azure Arc, extend its edge capabilities and add functionality to Microsoft Teams. Its Azure for Operators telco strategy provides network operators with a carrier-grade platform for edge and cloud.

Mirantis
Adrian Ionel
CEO

Mirantis Container Cloud, formerly Docker Enterprise Container Cloud, is a set of microservices deployed using Helm charts and run in a Kubernetes cluster. It’s based on the Kubernetes Cluster API community initiative. The open cloud software company’s Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes virtualization platform is a containerized edition of the OpenStack open-source, private cloud IaaS platform.

Nimbella
Anshu Agarwal
Co-Founder, CEO

Nimbella’s serverless cloud platform is based on enterprise-grade, open-source software and is available as a managed and hosted service or full-stack offering. It allows developers to code only application logic and leave the platform to manage configuration of integral services such as storage management, capacity provisioning, auto-scaling, monitoring and logging.

Nutanix
Rajiv Ramaswami
President, CEO

Gartner named Nutanix a Magic Quadrant leader for hyperconverged infrastructure software for the fourth straight year for its comprehensive HCI software capabilities and data services for on-premises and public cloud. Nutanix last year increased its HCI sales organization investments, expanded support for server hardware OEMs and debuted Nutanix Clusters for hybrid environments.

Oracle
Safra Catz
CEO

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Autonomous Database and Fusion give Oracle confidence the company will get its fair share of the new generation of cloud apps and infrastructure. Oracle beat Wall Street estimates in December, but said revenue would have been higher if OCI could meet demand. Oracle is remedying that by adding capacity and building new data centers.

OrionVM
Sheng Yeo
Co-Founder, CEO

OrionVM is a wholesale Infrastructure-as-as-Service provider with a hyperconverged tech suite including virtual storage, compute, orchestration and virtual networking. Its new Micro Point of Presence installs and manages high-performance infrastructure that internet service and hosting providers can white-label and bring to market directly or through their resellers.

Rackspace Technology
Kevin Jones
CEO

Gartner named Rackspace Technology as a leader in its Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Professional and Managed Services, and said it was the only one successfully repositioning itself as a next-generation global systems integrator. Rackspace went public last August after raising $704 million in an IPO.

Red Hat
Paul Cormier
President, CEO

Open-source solutions leader Red Hat looks to seize a massive hybrid cloud opportunity through partners extending their practices beyond its core Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The IBM subsidiary is buying StackRox, a container and Kubernetes-native security developer, to boost Red Hat OpenShift, its Kubernetes platform for managing hybrid and multi-cloud container deployments.

Tencent Cloud
Ma Huateng
Founder, CEO

VMware
Zane Rowe
Interim CEO

Rooted in virtualization software, VMware is transitioning to hybrid/multi-cloud, containers and security. Its $676 million in subscription and SaaS revenue surpassed on-premises license revenue for the first time in the fiscal quarter ended in October, with better-than-expected growth in the VMware Cloud Provider Program, modern applications and VMware Cloud on AWS. In February, former CEO Pat Gelsinger left the company to take the CEO position at Intel. VMware’s Zane Rowe was named as interim CEO.