It seems like every day there’s a new company touting their infrastructure stack.   I’m sure I’m missing some, but I show more than 30 solutions for building clouds below, and I am sure that more are on their way.  The market certainly can’t support so many participants!  Not for very long anyway.  This is the definition of a “red ocean” situation — lots of noise, and lots of blood in the water.

This is the list of the stacks that I am aware of:

I. Dedicated Commercial Cloud Stacks

• Eucalyptus Enterprise Editon
• Cloud.com CloudStack (now Citrix)
• VMware vCloud Director
• Surgient Platform
• Enomaly ECP
• CA/3Tera AppLogic
• Abiquo
• Nimbula Director
• Citrix XenCloud
• Univa UniCloud
• Parallels Elastic IT
• RedHat Cloud Foundations
• Intalio/IaaS
• HexaGrid VxDatacenter
• Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller
• Joyent Smart OS
• Flexiant Extility
• Platform ISF

II.  Open Source Cloud Stacks

• OpenStack
  • Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (Canonical)
  • Piston (coming)
  • Nebula
  • others…
• OpenNebula
• Nimbus Project
• Wakame-VDC (Japan)

III.  IT Automation Tools with Cloud Functionality

• BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management
• CA Automation Suite for Clouds
• HP Cloud Service Automation
• Dell VIS
• Novell Cloud Manager
• DynamicOps

IV.  Private Cloud Appliances

• Morph Labs mCloud
• IBM CloudBurst
• Unisys Secure Private Cloud
• Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud
• Vblock from EMC/Cisco/VMware
• Microsoft Azure Appliance (future)

I hope you’ll pardon my dubious take, but I can’t possibly understand how most of these will survive.  Sure, some will because they are big and others because they are great leaps forward in technology (though I see only a bit of that now).  There are three primary markets for stacks:  enterprise private clouds, provider public clouds, and public sector clouds.  In five years there will probably be at most 5 or 6 companies that matter in the cloud IaaS stack space, and the rest will have gone away or taken different routes to survive and (hopefully) thrive.

If you’re one of the new stack providers – think long and hard about this situation before you make your splash.  Sometimes the best strategy is to pick another fight.  If you swim in this red ocean, you might end up as shark bait.