tecosystems

Who’s Winning the Cloud Marketing Battle?

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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)
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.

3 comments

  1. So if I read that correctly, Microsoft has had a little over 4000 “mentions” in the last six months, but NONE of them were in the last three months? A little surprising … but maybe indicative of its desktop-centric history and perception?

  2. @Ric: no, the 6 month circle is obscuring the 3 month circle. click on the “Mentions 3 Months) in the legend to the left and it will remove the 6 months. you’ll see that MSFT has had similar success in the last quarter.

  3. This statistics on a search query for ‘cloud computing xxx’ is highly flawed. Using another perhaps just as biased data source, google news search, one can see the details of the counts. Yes ‘cloud computing microsoft’ lead the way by more than double, which confirms the stats above, but that is because Office and Sharepoint are the two biggest ms application that could rest on a cloud. Taking those away, perhaps just search for azure, you’ll get a truer picture of the microsoft cloud.

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