As revealed at the IDC conference held this week in the Bay area, only six to eight major cloud infrastructure-as-a-service vendors will remain on a global scale, once the dust settles.  IDC even named some of them: Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce Force.com, and Microsoft Windows Azure.

Missing are IBM, HP, Rackspace, and a few others.  I guess those companies did not get the notice that they are going out of business.

The reality is that there will indeed be a consolidation of cloud players, and I suspect the IDC list is not far off point.  However, I feel the market is becoming more fragmented than many suspect.  Smaller cloud players are finding a nice niche in the market to cling to, and larger players will stub their toes at some point and lose market share.

The core problem is one of investment.  You can’t compete with the big guys who have billions to spend when they build their cloud infrastructure.  Moreover, if they need something, they just purchase smaller companies to get it.

However, the market is just not that simple.  I suspect the number of popular clouds will go well into the dozens in the next 5 years, and perhaps include a few that we’ve yet to hear of.