Bessemer Cloudscape: A map of the major cloud players
Even as global markets struggle beneath the weight of unemployment, government paralysis, debt crises and Occupy Wall Street, one segment of the economy enjoys explosive growth with the promise of leading the recovery, one job at a time: cloud computing.
Cloud computing is no longer at the leading edge of the software world, but rather from the perspective of a growth investor, entrepreneur, or technology buyer, cloud computing IS the modern software industry. This multi-billion dollar, high-growth segment of technology now encompasses hundreds of exciting companies, covering every major segment of the software ecosystem. At Bessemer Venture Partners, we were unable to find a single compelling visual to track the leading companies in this revolution, so we synthesized our own based on thousands of meetings over the last decade.
Earlier this month we assembled 100 of the top thought leaders at Bessemer’s annual CEO conference on cloud computing, and the response was extremely positive to this approach. After many follow-up requests for a digital copy of the visual, we’ve decided to “open source” this chart and make it available to the cloud community, as we have done with many of our other white papers and research materials throughout the years.
We hope that the depth and breadth of high quality companies on this graphic is as striking to you as it is to us. There are now multiple successful SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS vendors in virtually every major sub segment of software, and most are growing very rapidly. We can’t share private financial data by company, but in aggregate I can share that among the private Bessemer portfolio companies on this chart, the average growth rate exceeds 100% annually. The public data is equally compelling; among Bessemer’s recent cloud IPOs, including LinkedIn, Cornerstone OnDemand, and Broadsoft, their Q3 GAAP revenue grew year over year 126%, 63%, and 60% respectively. Although they are not nearly as sexy as B2C internet stories like Facebook and Yelp, the B2B world is now eagerly awaiting the IPOs of the next wave of cloud companies like Bazaar Voice, Eloqua, and Workday.
As a result of the rapid growth of the cloud computing industry, there is one major challenge that plagues almost all of the companies on this chart: hiring! Many of these companies literally have dozens of open positions and are paying recruiters large sums of money to identify talent. This collective market demand is projected to literally translate into thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of revenue creation in the coming years. So if you’re looking to join the cloud revolution, this list is a pretty good place to start. Send your resume to some of the companies on this list image, because they’re hiring!
One final thought: we did wrestle with the placement and inclusion or exclusion of certain companies, and we’d welcome your feedback. Please be vocal and send us your input and detailed thoughts to cloudvc@bvp.com. We promise to consider all input and will incorporate much of it into our next version, which we will continue to update and make available online at www.bvp.com/cloud.
Byron is an experienced cloud founder and CEO, co-author of Bessemer’s 10 Laws of Cloud Computing, and currently leads the cloud computing practice at Bessemer Venture Partners. For more information: www.bvp.com/cloud
Image courtesy of Flickr user commorancy.
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Open sourcing it would mean that anyone can make changes (e.g. wikipedia), you are simply publishing it as is.
Wow! I kinda have to question the validity of this when there no mention of Canonical, the backer of the most popular OS for the cloud…Ubuntu.
And what about Service Providers like AT&T, VZ, etc.
i dont think too much research happened..! Very questionable validity. where is openshift, redhat, canonical, cloudforms, linode, shall i go on? I wouldnt put github as a paas either, its not. Your chart is pretty however.
This is a complete joke, right? Microsoft Office 365 is not listed in areas such as collaboration (delivers SharePoint, Exchange and Lync Online) and others… Let’s assume good intent – and gross imcompetency…
I could see Sharepoint in SaaS.
I could see MS Sharepoint in SaaS.
Your comment would be valid if anyone was actually using Microsoft 365…
I would have to question the validity of this when there minimal to no mention of open source platforms such as Red Hat’s Cloud Forms offering. A significant number of Cloud provider have built their offerings based on open source platforms.
Nick could you point to a resource which supports the open source claim? My understanding was it was mostly VMware.
Even ‘Citrix systems’ is missing. They are one of the early pioneer’s, even when Cloud name was not famous!
Hi. Even “Citrix Systems’. They are pioneer in the field, even before the term ‘Cloud’ was coined.
Hi. Even “Citrix Systems’ is missing!. They are pioneer in the this field, even before the term ‘Cloud’ was coined.
Another omission: Ariba. Cloud-based collaborative business commerce.
Bessemer, left out a BIG one. Adobe measures and optimizes 5 trillion+ transactions on the cloud every year for over 5,000 customers. Pretty sure we should be in there somewhere.
The Mac-Centric Cloud Solution Dolly Drive is not mentioned under Content Management under End User Applications. For more information look at wikipedia or dolly drive’s website
Haha. Umm nice try but where is Citrix????
For the sake of transparency: on the IaaS layer, Bessemer should include Calpont. Calpont makes InfiniDB, an analytic database that competes with Vertica (a former Bessemer VP portfolio company).
What about MessageBus.com? Anyone have any new information on them?
umm…Hello? How about Ariba? Huge collaborative commerce cloud community.
As others have pointed out, seems to be a lot missing. Under Human Resources, Ultimate Software (ULTI) is missing. $270 million revenue almost all coming from their SaaS business. Might want to add them as I believe that makes them one of the largest (in terms of revenue) Enterprise SaaS companies.
What is LogMeIn doing in Collaboration?
I concur with Francois below: if Box is in collaboration, the least would be to have SharePoint in there are well.
BTW, Citrix is in there with GoToMeeting (though that’s only one piece of their offering).
Not sure what Facebook is doing in Enterprise Social Media either. How “Enterprise” is Facebook today? If Twitter is in that category, then surely LinkedIn should also be part of it (and not just in the more restrictive HR category).
On the positive side, there’s a good amount of research in this and it’s clearly not necessarily easy to categorize all the “cloud” vendors, whatever cloud might mean (since it’s the latest buzzword for online services, everyone wants to be branded “cloud” these days… but who can blame them?)
Hello Byron, I think you are missing the cloud “glue”.
How is all this going to be tied together?
If all this cannot inter-operate, its no good.
Glaring omission from this list is Ariba. Surprising it missed your eye. Wondering what your criteria was while building this list.
Thanks for the great input, and as promised, we’ll try to digest all of this and do another quick turn on the visual shortly. A few quick responses in the interim:
- We actually do have Adobe (through Omniture), MSFT (with Azure, Sharepoint, and CRM), and Citrix (with GoToMeeting) in already. You can certainly make the case that they (and others) should be listed in other buckets as well, but we tried to highlight the strongest segments for each company. We’ll consider listing them in more places based on this feedback as you make good points.
- Ariba was just a (big) miss. Particularly embarrassing given that Keith Krach is one of the legends of the industry and we sat on the Retail Solutions board together for years and we now work together @ DocuSign…sorry!
- RedHat was also a miss and should be added because of their direct cloud offerings, although we haven’t included the datacenter infrastructure software, hardware, or pure “private cloud” providers on purpose because those segments are well covered by traditional software visuals.
- We have intentionally left off the service providers and SI’s do avoid too much clutter, but someone else could add that layer if you wanted to do so.
- Of the dozens of tweets, comments, and emails we’ve received, there will be at least another half dozen great company additions coming in the next version as well
- We have made a high res version of this available to download if you click through the image link in response to many requests.
Hi Byron, nice slide on the current cloud landscape. It’d be great if you could add Nimbula under Infrastructure-as-a-Service. On Tuesday Nimbula won the Most Innovative Cloud Computing Provider at UP 2011 (Cloud Conference).
Were these just the cloud investments that Bessemer made? If not, I’d add SpringCM to the list.
How is LinkedIn an HR SaaS offering? Because people use it to recruit? The basic function of an HR offering is to track employee information, and LinkedIn doesn’t. It belongs under Social Media.
ReadyTech is missing as well as a full service Infrastructure as a Service provider for Training, QA, and Sales Demos.
Are there any Healthcloud or HealthcareIT firms that could be included on this map? Currently doing some R&D on a Healthcloud concept and was looking for some insight.
Thanks again for the great feedback, and I’m happy to say that we’ve been able to incorporate a lot of the input into an updated visual just posted at http://www.bvp.com/cloud (including folks like Adobe as a standalone as with Omniture, Ariba, Nimbula, Redhat, Ultimate, etc..).
The biggest change you’ll note is that we’ve dropped the AdTech bucket because we weren’t able to do it justice with such a small slice of the cloud world. That market deserves its own chart, and already has several versions in circulation so we won’t repeat that great work. Instead, we have added an “IT” box that intentionally slices across SaaS and PaaS to cover products that have IT as their end users, versus pure PaaS offerings that are designed to be upon by developers.
Stefan – You’ll be happy to note that we did add “glue” (integration) companies into the new IT bucket, but in response to the other comments we have kept service providers out for the reasons I noted previously.
Jessica – LinkedIn is not only a SaaS HR offering, but actually one of the largest and fastest growing. People naturally often think of them for their network, subscription, and advertising businesses, but as they have publicly disclosed, a large and rapidly growing portion of their revenue comes from enterprise SaaS solutions.
Kerry – we have several heathcare IT SaaS companies listed under the vertical SaaS bucket (Veeva, MediFinance, Navicure, PointclickCare, etc..) but admittedly could list many more.
Thanks for the great input – please keep it coming and we’ll continue to incorporate your changes in future versions!