Cloud investment & horse betting

In my earlier blog,  I listed 29 most promising cloud companies as listed by network world and other sources.

Now GigaOm headline is September 24, 2010: Cloud Startup Values Are Getting Insane. 
RightScale and Eucalyptus are getting $100M valuation. The GigaOm guys, right in heart of Silicon Valley know how to sell hot news. With their announced Pro service, they ar emore  informed  than the traditional analysts, and they themselves had a $2.5M round of  funding.


A year earlier in September 2009 we had the  11 Top Open-source Resources for Cloud Computing

The latest news October 29  2010 are the 10 best financed cloud startups. Here they are:

1. Aster Data Systems – $53 million

2. RightScale – $42.5 million

3. Virtustream – $40 million

4. Engine Yard – $37.5 million

5. Cloudera – $36 million

6. Nirvanix – $35 million

7. rPath – $32 million

8. Eucalyptus – $25.5 million

9. Joyent – $22 million

10. Nimbula – $20.75 million

 I checked how many companies were listed in 29 most promising cloud companies.in terms of market share. Only  Rightscale made the lists of best and they may have some significant revenues.

One the question I have, is how they reached these $100M valuations? And if they did, what we call most promising, or companies to watch are not fulfilling yet  the expectations. Looking at 11 Top Open-source Resources for Cloud Computing  where are the  starts ups based  on Open Nebula, Zoho, Puppet, Traffic Server and even RedHat cloud?

Other fast newcomers are data grid companies like  NoSQL or  the massively parallel databases. Their Meetups in the Valley are gathering a lot of attention, and soon we will see significant investments in Cassandra, Riak and other AWS Dynamo derivatives.

So betting on technology is like betting on horses: favorites don't win always and the jackpot could be in small new companies no one has heard off until they become winners.