I have been reviewing as many Cloud Service providers as I can get my hands on. I am building a database right now of them and their products, locations, and types of providers. I am breaking them into the following types:
Cloud service providers usually fit neatly into one or many of those categorizations without a problem. Except for one group; the growing number of cloud management software providers.
There are some that have their own data centers or platforms so they easily fit into a category. However there are many service providers that purely provide a cloud management set of tools that work with one provider (Amazon) or several providers, and they offer no infrastructure or platform. They are a software, but not the end user Software as a Service (SaaS) we are used to.
I have gone back and forth on this one, feeling they need their own categorization. Then no....they are just a IaaS provider, or wait no Paas, wait no...SaaS.
I even discussed this with Audrey and she was intrigued enough to ask RWW readers if
the 3 Common Acronyms for Cloud Services Sufficient?
I am now dubbing cloud management software as Management as a Service (MaaS).
