No Cloud Left To Fail

HPE shuttered its Helion public cloud early in 2016. Likewise with Verizon's public cloud. Cisco Intercloud Services will meet the same fate in March. Rackspace is squarely focused on becoming a managed services play for other providers.

With the Big 3 of Amazon, Microsoft and Google gobbling up market share, and so many rival providers having recently exited or pulled back from the Infrastructure-as-a-Service market, the natural question is who's left to fail?

IBM SoftLayer is still standing, and suddenly unique as an OpenStack-virtualized IaaS cloud. And several tier-two players remain, including Oracle, NTT, and Alibaba.

Those providers all have market niches strong enough to at least keep them afloat, and while it'll be an uphill battle for any to gain share against AWS, they should survive the long year ahead and still be kicking into 2018.