CloudTracker, Fourth-Quarter 2014

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. Trend Tracker
  3. Market Tracker
  4. Mergers and Acquisitions Tracker
  5. Executive Tracker
  6. Funding Tracker
  7. Disruptive Cloud Technology of the Quarter: AWS Lambda
  8. Outlook: First-Quarter 2015
  9. About Janakiram MSV

1. Summary

CloudTracker analyzes the latest trends from the cloud-computing market, including updates from key players, mergers and acquisitions, executive transitions, and funding news. We follow this with an in-depth analysis and commentary.

With over 10 acquisitions, 15 executive transitions, and more than a dozen companies getting funded, the fourth quarter of 2014 saw many new developments that will make for a busy first quarter of 2015.

Highlights from the quarter include:

  • We saw a rift in the open-source Linux container ecosystem when Canonical and CoreOS split from Docker, Inc. and came out with their own implementation of application containers.
  • The orchestrating and clustering of containers went mainstream, with Amazon and Google officially launching container-based compute services.
  • The OpenStack market continued to consolidate, as evidenced by EMC’s acquisition of Cloudscaling and Cisco’s interest in MetaCloud.
  • Hadoop-as-a-Service providers Altiscale and Qubole made news for closing impressive rounds of funding.
  • The race to the bottom continues, with cloud providers competitively cutting prices. The fourth quarter of 2014 saw yet-another round of price cuts from Google and Amazon.
  • Major industry events — AWS re:Invent, Dreamforce, DockerCon Europe, Google Cloud Platform Live, HP Discover, Oracle OpenWorld, and OpenStack Summit — happened this past quarter, leading to many announcements about new services and features.

Thumbnail image courtesy of samxmeg/iStock.