Good article!

I definitely see redefined usage all over the place. It’s a tactic, as you mentioned, the focuses on creating uncertainty/confusion and can generally slow things down.I look forward to when the industry really shakes out the obvious poor definitions, but that’ll take some time.

Rhett
Service-now.com

While I wouldn’t use the presence of a channel as categorization criteria (since it’s not a technical attribute of the PaaS offering), I think you’ve identified an important part of the decision making process when evaluating PaaS offerings. Having a good channel is important for distribution, but I suspect PaaS providers not built around a central offering (like Salesforce) will employ unique business models to tap into even more expansive distribution channels offered by partners.

I think that Categorization is good. I think there will be some sort of subcategory in PaaS. I named for myself as with community and without community. My point is that if you made your application on Force.com you have instant distribution channel to Force.com community. And you have access to some basic data of application subscriber. With GAE you have application gallery and access to Google Account, but I think there is a difference. Okay, maybe it is useless to categorize in this way. I am not quite sure about it. What do you think?

Great post, goes a long way towards decluttering the space.

Thanks for the link to the presentation! You’re absolutely right in terms of lines getting blurry and the interactions between the layers. I suspect that good marketing can help ISVs identify how different partners in the pyramid might help them in building their SaaS offering. In the future, it should be as easy as recognizing that JBoss is hosted by managed service providers and that I can deploy to JBoss installs on a variety of cloud or traditional providers. We don’t confuse JBoss with say, Rackspace; we all understand that they are distinct entities.

I think that your Cloud Categorization is quite accurate, in fact, I’m glad to see the concept of the “Cloud Pyramid” that I have been championing for some time being used. See this (older and a bit outdated) presentation A few months ago, I added two more categories to the pyramid for Cloud Aggregators (like RightScale) and Cloud Extenders (like SimpleDB). Aggregators will see some more success, I predict, in 2009 as they look to diversify their offerings to encompass more Clouds (not putting all of your eggs in one basket sort of thing). Extenders (services that require the use of other Clouds) will also continue to grow as ancillary services emerge.
To answer your other question, IaaS and PaaS will continue to be quite different beasts IMHO as they offer a different type of service and control. You liken IaaS to bare-metal (there are obviously huge difference but from the control perspective, they do somewhat equate). Platforms offer a bit less control (e.g., you have to code in Python for AppEngine or use Force.com’s proprietary language). Platform plays can be built upon Infrastructures (whether cloud or traditional).
We will definitely see a lot of intermingling over the next few months. I think things will get blurry once again in terms of offerings can span multiple layers of the Cloud Pyramid.
Good article! Got me thinking!

-Michael Sheehan
(Technology Evangelist for GoGrid)