Top 10 IaaS Clouds: CSP Reviews, Rankings of AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, More

Which companies are the 10 best cloud services providers (CSPs) for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in North America? Cloud Spectator reviewed that question, ranks various CSPs and provides answers based on overall performance and price-performance metrics.

Cloud Spectator's Top 10 Cloud IaaS Providers Benchmark report for 2017 explores IaaS companies that have North America data centers, weighing such  performance metrics as vCPU, memory, block storage and value.

Top 10 Cloud IaaS Providers: CSP Review & Ranking

In terms of overall price-performance outcomes, Cloud Spector's ranked the top 10 IaaS providers in this order:

Drill down into vCPU and memory value, and the rankings shift slightly:

And in terms of block storage value, Cloud Spectator's top 10 rankings were:

Admittedly, we've only touched on the overall report findings. You can register to download the complete report here.

IaaS and Channel Partner Programs

Of the Top 10 IaaS companies tracked in the report, channel partner commitments vary from company to company. Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Google each are making major channel partner pushes -- but in slightly different ways. Here's ChannelE2E's spin on the situation...

Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure: Amazon has successfully lined up scores of MSPs to support AWS (here are 50 of the top AWS MSPs, as tracked by ChannelE2E). More recently, Microsoft has been training VARs and MSPs to extend from Office 365 to Azure.

Google Cloud Platform: The story is slightly different for Google, which has been focusing mostly on price-performance victories while lining up partners that understand big data analytics and artificial intelligence. At the Next 2017 conference in March, watch for Google to aggressively court Microsoft partners and customers. In fact, Google will likely position its cloud as the best option for running Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server.

IBM Cloud: IBM, meanwhile, stumbled a bit during the early innings of cloud computing. Most of the focus involved selling servers to MSPs -- a strategy that didn't gain traction and ultimately led IBM to sell its x86 server business to Lenovo. More recently, IBM has courted developers to support Blue Mix cloud efforts. While IBM cloud revenues are growing quickly, we don't hear much about the company working with SMB channel partners.

CenturyLink: Yes, the company still offers cloud services. But partners might be a bit wary because CenturyLink ultimately sold its data centers in late 2016 to focus mostly on network services. The move basically conceded the public cloud IaaS market to Amazon and Microsoft.

Rackspace: An early cloud leader, Rackspace stumbled when it tried to make OpenStack the de-facto public and private cloud alternative to AWS. The move had mixed results. Somewhere along the line (around 2012) Rackspace also lost its channel partner focus. More recently, the company has focused mostly on managed services for third-party clouds -- namely AWS and Azure. But here again revenues aren't growing fast enough to offset weakness elsewhere in Rackspace's business. A private equity firm acquired Rackspace in 2016, and the hosting provider cut 6 percent of its US workforce in 2017.

The other Top 10 Players: Check in with each of them for more details on their various channel strategies.