Eleven cloud computing vendors to watch

Akamai, Amazon and Salesforce will be the most familiar to enterprise IT. Akamai offers application performance services that speed up apps for users of cloud services, while Amazon offers the Amazon Elastic Compute Service (EC2) and storage in the cloud. Salesforce is pushing hosted apps and what it calls Platform as a Service, to help developers create new software in the cloud.

Terremark, Layered Technologies, XCalibre and startup Enki all play more behind the scenes in the hosting business that fuels and manages the cloud.

Also prominent at the moment is 3Tera, maker of AppLogic, which Forrester describes as "cloud computing infrastructure software" and a "grid engine." Basically, this is enabling software that lets a hosting provider put customer software in the cloud with a minimum of fuss, for starters. AppLogic works on physical servers and virtualized ones, enables cost-based reporting, and runs many applications "without redesign or reprogramming to a grid API," among other benefits, Forrester notes. Check out the report for more details on all the vendors and Forrester's take on the competitive landscape.

No doubt, cloud computing, especially as Amazon envisions it, is in its early days, complete with hype and confusing jargon.

Nonetheless, for IT execs, the sooner that you tune into how people in your enterprise are playing with the cloud, the better, Forrester's Staten says. "Even if IT can't justify leveraging clouds, your business units will," he notes in the report's conclusion. "Cloud is a compelling business proposition, infrastructure they can provision with a credit card, with low barriers to entry and to exit. Rather than block their efforts, learn from them."