One of the cloud related questions we get with some frequency is: who’s winning the marketing battle? For all that the cloud has (justifiably) become a much maligned term for technologists, thanks to the liberal abuse of the term by marketers everywhere, the fact remains that the cloud represents the next major battlefield for vendors small and large. As such, getting insight into who is being talked about, and how much – relative to their competitors – is a useful bit of intelligence.
To help answer this question, I decided to take a quick look at some numbers from ITDatabase.com – who is a client, for the sake of disclosure. The following visualization plots to the actual press hits ITDatabase has recorded over the past three and six months, respectively, for a query of “cloud computing.” This is certainly not an authoritative answer to the question of whose winning the cloud marketing battle, but I found the results interesting enough to share.
Cloud Computing Press Mentions (via ITDatabase) 
The surprises for me were Apple and Microsoft. Also interesting were the fact that Amazon and IBM were roughly on par, and that large providers like Rackspace and suppliers such as Red Hat didn’t make the list. The fact that most of the rest of the players were on par was more predictable.
Again, this is a single metric, and a proxy for visibility at that. But it is certainly something we’ll be discussing with our clients moving forward, and probably worth vendor consideration moving forward.
