Anyone allowing their search engine of choice to filter through Google's googols of bytes of data on the Web relating to "cloud computing" has during 2008 been rewarded with an exponentially increasing number of hits. But who are the companies currently most involved and what are their current offerings? SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal zeroes in on the facts and the faces behind this white-hot Enterprise IT technology trend.

Editorial note: The words used to describe the various services and solutions are in every case taken from the Web sites cited, so as ever we encourage developers, IT operations managers, and new/growing companies in every case to "suck it and see" by downloading or otherwise sampling the offering in question for themselves.

Omissions should be sent to cloud (at) sys-con.com, and we will endeavor to include them in a future revision of this round-up.

3PAR

3Tera - Offering what it calls "Cloud Computing Without Compromise," 3Tera enables the provision and deployment of "scalable clustered applications in minutes from anywhere in the world." The company currently has partners and is running in datacenters in seven countries (United States, Japan, Singapore, Argentina, United Kingdom, Netherlands and Serbia) on four continents (North America, South America, Asia, and Europe), with additional resources in South America and Australia soon to be available as well.

3Tera's President & CTO, Peter Nickolov, is a speaker at SYS-CON's upcoming Cloud Computing Expo in San Jose, CA (19-21 November, 2008).

Akamai

Amazon - When Amazon introduced its virtual computing environment, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2, "to enable you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days," it singlehandedly brought Cloud Computing to the very forefront of public awareness by using Web services to provide what it called resizable compute capacity in the cloud." EC2 runs within Amazon's proven network infrastructure and datacenters and allows customers to pay only for what they use (there is no minimum fee).

Amazon's VP & CTO Dr Werner Vogels is the Keynote Speaker at SYS-CON's upcoming Cloud Computing Expo in San Jose, CA (19-21 November, 2008).

Appistry - As a company that positions itself boldly "At the convergence of Grid Computing, Virtualization and SOA" Appistry offers a grid-based application platform that makes it very easy to scale-out CPU- and data-intensive applications across a virtualized grid of commodity servers. Unlike traditional grid products based on legacy scheduler technology, the company's robust "fabric" architecture has no single point of failure and "is well suited for extreme transaction processing (XTP), software-as-a-service (SaaS), cloud computing, and other data- and CPU-intensive applications."

Kevin Haar, Appistry CEO is a spe