Cloud Investment Soaring To New Heights

Hundreds of billions of dollars will be spent on cloud infrastructure, software and services this year as more businesses are planning to migrate their IT environments and applications to the cloud.

Many of the largest technology companies are betting big on cloud computing, including Google Cloud, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services—the top three dominant cloud players in the world today.

“Cloud migration is not stopping,” said Sid Nag, vice president analyst at research firm Gartner, in a statement.

“Current inflationary pressures and macroeconomic conditions are having a push-and-pull effect on cloud spending. Cloud computing will continue to be a bastion of safety and innovation, supporting growth during uncertain times due to its agile, elastic and scalable nature,” Nag said.

Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services alone is set to reach nearly $600 billion in 2023, according to Gartner, with cloud infrastructure and software powering these services.

From cloud infrastructure and cloud monitoring and management to cloud software, security and storage, CRN has named 100 companies leading the way in 2023 in cloud and channel innovation.

By moving operations to cloud infrastructure, customers can reduce capital expenditures by extending spending over a subscription term, which is a key benefit to businesses when having cash is critical to maintaining operations.

Meanwhile, cloud monitoring and management to keep customers’ experiences with their applications in top shape, make sure the software stack is secure and create guardrails against blowing past financial budgets will likely continue to attract new users even as companies take another look at spending amid potential recession concerns.

When it comes to cloud security, some of the largest and most innovative companies are investing heavily in their products and technologies as more customers migrate their infrastructure, data and applications to the cloud.

With cyberattacks on cloud infrastructure continuing and the COVID-19 pandemic creating a new hybrid workforce, cloud security vendors are playing a more critical role in protecting organizations than ever before.

The shift to cloud-based software, meanwhile, continues to accelerate as businesses and organizations are increasingly taking a Software-as-a-Service-first approach to software consumption, both to replace on-premises legacy systems and implement new systems that offer advanced functionality combined with better flexibility.

Businesses are moving software of all types to cloud platforms— including operational applications such as ERP and CRM, collaboration and communications software, data management and analytics platforms as well as artificial intelligence and application development tools.

On the storage front, organizations are now placing more emphasis on protecting cloud-based data from cybersecurity attacks, especially ransomware.

Cloud storage vendors are tackling the issue of what happens if an attack does occur and either deletes or modifies the data or attaches new attacks to the data that can be sprung if it is recovered. They are responding with technologies such as air gapping, immutability and new ways of authorizing specific users to access data.

From IT hardware and software giants to red-hot startups, here are the 100 cloud computing companies that will make waves in 2023.—By

Mark Haranas

Cloud Infrastructure Vendors

Cloud infrastructure powers public, private and hybrid cloud environments with hundreds of billions of dollars up for grabs as more and more businesses migrate to the cloud. Here are 20 companies that are poised to lead the cloud infrastructure market in 2023.—Mark

Haranas

Amazon Web Services

Cisco Systems

Dell Technologies

Digital Realty

Element Critical

Adam

Selipsky CEO

AWS is pouring billions of dollars into its evergrowing cloud infrastructure footprint on a worldwide basis. The cloud market leader launched new AWS Cloud Regions and data centers in Switzerland, Spain and inside the U.S. last year, with more investments on the horizon for 2023.

Flexential

Chris Downie CEO

Flexential, a data center cloud infrastructure provider, has a wide range of cloud offerings to solve complex IT challenges around private, public and hybrid cloud. The Flexential Cloud Fabric gives customers secure, low-latency connections to cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Lumen Technologies

Kate Johnson President, CEO

Lumen enables customers to connect to and deploy multiple public or private clouds within a single hybrid cloud platform. It also o ers cloud storage and networking infrastructure and has a global data center footprint. In November, the company hired former Microsoft executive Johnson as its new president and CEO.

Chuck Robbins Chair, CEO

While Cisco’s hardware powers vast amounts of cloud infrastructure, its portfolio of cloud software for networking, security and application management is elevating the company. Cisco and T-Mobile recently launched the world’s largest cloudnative 5G core gateway to boost performance for customers.

Google Cloud

Thomas Kurian CEO

Google Cloud invests billions of dollars each year in cloud infrastructure across the globe by opening new cloud regions with the goal of increasing its market share. In 2022, Google Cloud entered new markets abroad at a fierce pace, including in Malaysia, Thailand and New Zealand.

Microsoft

Satya Nadella Chairman, CEO

Microsoft spends billions of dollars annually expanding its cloud infrastructure reach by launching new cloud regions and data centers on a global basis. The software and cloud giant’s Intelligent Cloud segment generated $20.3 billion in revenue during its first fiscal quarter 2023 as Azure sales increased 35 percent year over year.

Michael Dell Founder, Chairman, CEO

Dell is a leading provider of servers and storage hardware to power cloud infrastructure. It is now doubling down on delivering cloud as a service with offering such as Apex Cloud Services, which provides hybrid or private cloud infrastructure with integrated compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources.

Hewlett Packard

Enterprise

Antonio Neri President, CEO

HPE is a top provider of servers, networking and storage hardware for cloud infrastructure. The HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform o ers Infrastructure as a Service, and the company also introduced new capabilities for HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, which o ers a private cloud with a public cloud experience.

Nutanix Rajiv Ramaswami President, CEO

The Nutanix Cloud Platform lets customers run any application at scale via its software-defined cloud. Compute, storage, virtualization and networking are hyperconverged and driven by software on the platform. Nutanix software also is integrated with hardware platforms from HPE, Cisco and Intel.

Andrew

Power President, CEO

One of the largest data center providers worldwide, Digital Realty delivers colocation offerings for cloud infrastructure. The company also provides cloud and hybrid offerings to enable customers to get a mix of cloudenabled and privately supported applications to meet all cloud connection needs.

IBM Arvind Krishna Chairman, CEO

The IBM Cloud portfolio offers a full-stack cloud platform with over 170 products and services—from AI and IoT to containers and blockchain. The IBM Cloud platform combines Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service for public, hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Ken Parent CEO

Element

Critical's

U.S. data centers bring to life cloud infrastructure and hybrid cloud strategies. Whether it’s for AWS, Microsoft Azure, Oracle or Google Cloud, the company’s EC Cloud Connect delivers direct, private and multi-cloud access with provisioning in minutes.

Lenovo Yang Yuanqing Chairman, CEO

Lenovo o ers cloud infrastructure via its server, storage and networking hardware portfolio. Its aim is to accelerate customers’ cloud transformation by delivering end-to-end cloud life-cycle management. Lenovo also provides cloud infrastructure as a service via its TruScale Infrastructure Services.

Rackspace Technology

Amar Maletira CEO

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is billed as the nextgeneration cloud, designed to run any application faster and more securely for a less expensive price tag. The company is investing in opening new cloud regions to expand its cloud infrastructure footprint while forming deeper partnerships with Microsoft and Nvidia.

Rackspace’s RackConnect Global o ering creates a VPN with access to popular cloud infrastructure, while Rackspace Fabric o ers a single platform for automated cloud services. The company specializes in securing, adopting and managing cloud infrastructure and provides about 40 colocation data centers.

Red Hat

Matt Hicks President, CEO

Red Hat is a leader in open-source solutions for any application on any cloud. From Red Hat OpenShift for Kubernetes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the company can automate, secure and manage hybrid cloud, multi-cloud and edge environments.

Red Hat also has integrations with AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud and Google Cloud.

Scale Computing

Je Ready

Founder, CEO

The Scale Computing Platform for hyperconverged infrastructure delivers scalability and availability for autonomously running applications, including in the cloud. The company partnered with Google to extend to the cloud with SC//Platform Cloud Unity, a hybrid cloud offering to make it easy to move workloads freely in the cloud or on-premises.

SoftIron

Phil

Straw

Co-Founder, CEO

SoftIron’s HyperCloud enables IT generalists to build and operate sophisticated hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructure. HyperCloud’s modular nature—combined with the simplicity in adding new compute and storage resources and secure multitenancy capabilities—means the cloud fabric can be scaled up or down to eliminate overprovisioning.

TierPoint

Jerry Kent Chairman, CEO

Data center provider

TierPoint o ers a slew of cloud services, from cloud disaster recovery and big data analytics to managed private cloud and cloud licensing optimization. TierPoint also delivers cloud connectivity and high-performance on-ramps between its data centers and public clouds.

VMware

Raghu Raghuram CEO

VMware’s software and integrated cloud hardware lets customers build, connect and protect applications on any cloud. VMware Cloud Foundation combines hyperconverged infrastructure, an enterprise-ready Kubernetes environment and cloud services to transform on-premises deployments into SaaSenabled infrastructure.

Cloud Monitoring And Management Vendors

Cloud monitoring and management vendors help keep the customer experience with their applications in top shape, make sure the software stack is secure and create guardrails against going over financial budgets. Here are 20 companies that will be shaking things up this year.—Wade Tyler Millward

AppDynamics

Ronak Desai

SVP, GM, Cisco AppDynamics, Full-Stack Observability

Cisco’s AppDynamics subsidiary has added business transaction insight capabilities to its AppDynamics Cloud observability o ering. The new features allow users to optimize performance and fix issues in near-real-time for AWS-connected applications, services and workloads.

Dynatrace

Rick McConnell CEO

Dynatrace has rolled out its new DevSecOps automation partner program and enhanced its Davis AI engine and Grail causational data lakehouse offerings. The company also extended Grail into power business analytics and Davis into ad hoc exploratory analytics.

Catchpoint

Mehdi Daoudi Co-Founder, CEO

Catchpoint has invested in its digital resilience and experience monitoring o erings with new internet performance monitoring capabilities, a website experience monitoring tool and the expansion of the WebPageTest platform. The company also has added anomaly detection and intelligent metric correlation to its platform.

Exoprise

Jason Lieblich

Founder, President

Exoprise added new capabilities to its Service Watch performance monitoring platform, including the ability for end-to-end network path analysis, packet loss and latency detection for conversations using audio and video, and hop-by-hop diagnosis for streaming applications.

CloudBolt Software

Je Kukowski CEO

CloudBolt has taken its hybrid cloud and cost management tools to the next level with new framework capabilities. In an effort to further automate cloud spend optimization, remediation and other actions, the company added rolebased cloud visibility and reporting and a curated automation and integration elements content library.

Flexera

Jim Ryan President, CEO

Flexera boosted its Flexera One platform with new financial operations o erings while deepening its relationship with IBM. The company added cloud spend anomaly detection based on any dimension, forecasting of cloud spend and usage plus more integration with Jira, ServiceNow and other tools.

Datadog

Olivier Pomel Co-Founder, CEO

Datadog has made its cloud cost management and universal microservices monitoring tools generally available. The company also acquired collaboration platform CoScreen, security testing software provider Hdiv, cloud visualization service provider Cloudcraft and API observability tools provider Seekret.

Harness

Jyoti Bansal Co-Founder, CEO

Harness launched a global MSP partner program to expand use of its Cloud Cost Management module for financial operations, DevOps and IT teams. The company also released a fully managed cluster orchestrator tool for optimizing Kubernetes cloud workload costs, deepening its integration with AWS products.

Devo Technology

Marc van Zadelho CEO

Devo has expanded its relationship with AWS, achieving a security competency status and inking a multiyear strategic collaboration designed in part to benefit MSSPs. The company also acquired security orchestration, automation and response provider LogicHub and autonomous threat hunting tool company Kognos.

LogicMonitor

Christina Kosmowski CEO

LogicMonitor launched its LM Envision unified observability platform, giving users new ways to visualize their IT data supply chain and assess the health of thousands of IT assets and applications. The company also launched a framework for resiliency readiness, furthering its status as an expert on digital preparedness.

Moogsoft

Phil Tee

Co-Founder,

Chairman, CEO

Moogsoft updated its platform with a correlation results preview function, a workflow engine trigger preview and custom administration roles. The company also added new Windows OS support for Moogsoft Collector, improved the user on-boarding experience and enhanced its incident and alert filters.

PagerDuty

Jennifer Tejada

Chairperson, CEO

PagerDuty beefed up its Operations Cloud, adding integrated customer-facing status pages, more flexible incident workflows and configurable AIOpspowered alert grouping. The company also added automated incident workflows, diagnostics and remediation to Operations Cloud.

Nerdio

Vadim Vladimirskiy CEO

Nerdio turned heads with its revamped Partnerd partner program for MSPs and added features to its Nerdio Manager for MSPs tool, including scripted actions and an approval workflow. The company last year announced a $117 million Series B round of funding, positioning the company well for 2023.

ScienceLogic

David Link

Founder, CEO

ScienceLogic acquired Zebrium last year, boosting its machine learning analytics capabilities. The addition of application diagnostics to ScienceLogic’s platform gives the company an edge as 2023 unfolds. In December, it reported $10.78 million in net annual contract value and 36 percent growth year over year.

Netreo

Jasmin Young CEO

Netreo inked an agreement with Arrow Electronics to help it sell exclusively through the channel and rolled out new features in its cloud monitoring products. The company’s tools provide observability and monitoring for products by Google, Salesforce and other cloud providers.

Spectro Cloud

Tenry Fu Co-Founder, CEO

Spectro Cloud’s Palette 3.0 aims to bring more control to Kubernetes environments, better fleet management and an improved developer experience. The company also introduced a new release of the Palette Edge platform, adding hardened edge Kubernetes distribution with immutable, read-only stacks.