The 20 Coolest Cloud Infrastructure Companies Of The 2022 Cloud 100
These 20 companies worked to meet new demand from a world that not only adapted the cloud to survive the pandemic, but now expects it as how we do business.
Cloud Infrastrucuture
Cloud infrastructure providers continue to invest in meeting the promise of cloud computing as a faster, more affordable and more analytical alternative to what businesses can do with their data and IT processes.
As part of CRN’s 2022 Cloud 100, these 20 companies worked to meet new demand from a world that not only adapted the cloud to survive the pandemic, but now expects it as how to do business.
Amazon Web Services
Adam Selipsky
CEO
The No. 1 cloud infrastructure provider saw major regime change during 2021 with new CEO Adam Selipsky and new Channel Chief Ruba Borno. The company also launched a new cost anomaly tool in 2021, new mainframe migration services and more data science offerings as part of its cloud innovations.
Cisco Systems
Chuck Robbins
Chairman, CEO
Cisco’s Webex Calling portfolio hit a record number of monthly calls in 2021, its AppDynamics observability platform continues to grow and the company wants to enhance its cloud contact center offering. Cisco also has beta trials for its first two new flexible consumption models for networking and hybrid cloud.
Civo
Mark Boost
Co-Founder, CEO
In 2021, Civo made its Kubernetes service using K3s generally available with a promise of speed, affordability and less resources than competing services. The company raised $2 million in funding and plans to release a GPU service, managed databases, load balancers and a Platform-as-a-Service offering.
Dell Technologies
Michael Dell
Founder, Chairman, CEO
Dell Technologies is working toward a consumption-based, as-a-service model through Dell Apex, with Apex Cloud Services providing as-a-service hybrid or private cloud infrastructure with integrated compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources to simplify cloud adoption.
DigitalOcean
Yancey Spruill
CEO
Going public, acquiring serverless platform provider Nimbella, delivering a redesigned control plan of DigitalOcean Kubernetes and unveiling new scalable virtual machines with Intel and AMD processors were some of the top stories this year for this cloud alternative that wants to compete with the tech giants.
Google Cloud
Thomas Kurian
CEO
Google Cloud grabbed headlines in 2021 with new tools on data capture and analytics; new integrations with Atlassian, Cybereason and other big-name vendors; a new distributed cloud solution portfolio and new incentives, rebates and Net Promoter Scores for partners.
HashiCorp
Dave McJannet
CEO
HashiCorp went public at the end of 2021, raising more than $1 billion. In a year of significant investment for the open-source DevOps technology provider, HashiCorp also unveiled new badges in its effort to grow its 700-plus-member partner program.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Antonio Neri
President, CEO
A brand-new GreenLake cloud services development model and the acquisitions of AI-based hybrid cloud assessment tool provider CloudPhysics and cloud data management and storage protection specialist Zerto were among the major moves from an on-premises giant that is continuing to carve its slice of the cloud market.
IBM
Arvind Krishna
CEO
IBM spun out its managed service infrastructure services business to double down on cloud services during a year that included the acquisition of Turbonomic, the launch of Watson Orchestrate for nonprogrammers to automate simple tasks, and updates to IBM’s Cloud Pak packages of tools and services.
Lenovo
Yang Yuanqing
Chairman, CEO
Lenovo turned heads in 2021 with its commitment to the cloud. The company expanded its TruScale Everything-as-a-Service offering for fully managed services in an on-premises cloud environment and enhanced its Lenovo Open Cloud Automation management software, among other updates.
Linode
Christopher Aker
Founder, CEO
Linode bills itself as a better alternative to the big cloud providers in performance per dollar. It continues to grow its nascent channel program as well as the third-party offerings in its marketplace. Major releases in 2021 include expanded support for containers and image uploads analytics.
Microsoft
Satya Nadella
Chairman, CEO
Microsoft pursued an industry-focused strategy in packages of cloud tools and services aimed at telecommunications, financial services, manufacturers and other verticals. The vendor has also released new tools around automation, data analytics and security to continue separating its cloud from the pack.
Nutanix
Rajiv Ramaswami
President, CEO
The hybrid multi-cloud giant launched new features around virtual networking, disaster recovery and security in 2021. Additional releases from Nutanix focused on increased performance for databases, simplified storage scaling and governance for unstructured data across multiple clouds.
Oracle
Safra Catz
CEO
The database giant made a number of updates including a new Oracle offering that makes in-house cloud specialists available to solution providers and customers and bringing its core cloud infrastructure capabilities to the edge with the introduction of Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure.
Lumen Technologies
Jeff Storey
President, CEO
Lumen delivers services through its cloud-based Lumen platform to support edge networking and next-gen applications. It also introduced Lumen Edge Gateway with the promise of virtualized services deployed in hours with no on-site equipment replacement and Lumen Edge Private Cloud for interaction-intensive applications.
Rackspace Technology
Kevin Jones
Director, CEO
A new platform for customers to disaggregate storage from public cloud compute, new cloud-native development services for application building and new access t0 cloud security experts were some of the cloud-focused offering from this hosting giant in 2021.
Red Hat
Paul Cormier
President, CEO
The secret s a u c e f o r IBM’s goals of owning the hybrid, multi-cloud space in 2022, Red Hat had an eventful year with new OpenShift capabilities around management, cluster security and predictive analytics, among other areas. Red Hat subsidiary Ansible also made major announcements around its automation tools.
The Constant Company
J.J. Kardwell
CEO
The Constant Company‘s flagship Vultr cloud cemented its position as an alternative the big clouds can’t ignore with a new generally released application programming interface, more third-party applications in the marketplace, expanded access to its Vultr Kubernetes Engine and more data centers worldwide.
Verizon Business
Tami Erwin
Group CEO, EVP
New partnership with Google Cloud for 5G mobile edge computing and Microsoft Azure for private mobile edge cloud computing marked some of the bigger cloud-related announcements from the networking giant in 2021. Demand for 5G should continue to grow in 2022 as more companies adopt cloud for various use cases.
VMware
Raghu Raghuram
CEO
With VMware now independent of Dell, the cloud and virtualization giant can form new and expanded partnerships with other vendors and move toward becoming the Switzerland of the multi-cloud world. The company also announced VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts and a revamped cloud console with a new cloud credit system