Cloud computing

If it is going to change our lives, spell the end of the PC, revolutionise technology spend and the way we share information, the more we know about who is going to profit the better, right?

Here we have a mind-bendingly wonderful and much awaited profile of the cloud industry. I know you thought it would never arrive, but here we are.

According to the latest release from Business Insider, here are the 10 most important companies in cloud computing:

1. Amazon – heard of them? They have Amazon S3
2. Rackspace – a massive coalition for free cloud software. Its power comes from OpenStack, an open source method for building clouds
3. Microsoft – which has its own enterprise cloud, Azure. Rumour has it that Azure will soon support Linux
4. Google – Google App Engine being a spot where developers can park their apps. Google Cloud Storage has been an alternative to Amazon S3
5. Red Hat – it gives it away for free with Open Shift
6. Citrix Systems – it builds software for clouds. It bought cloud.com for $200m about a year ago
7. Salesforce.com – where you can run your own home-grown applications: Heroku, which they bought for $212m in 2010
8. Linode – a fave for Linux users
9. VMware – doesn’t offer cloud services but makes vCloud, which is software used to build clouds.
10. Verizon – last year acquired Terremark in a $1.8b deal and became a major player among telco carriers which provide cloud services including AT&T and Qwest