(NOTE: This story was originally posted to CRN.com Feb. 1.)

Who's Coolest In Cloud Infrastructure?

Did you keep up with all the change in the cloud services infrastructure industry in 2016? The industry saw another exciting and volatile year, with a few more mega-providers withdrawing their wares amid brutal competition and share consolidation among a handful of hyper-scale players. Four companies -- Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM -- now take in more than half the world's Infrastructure-as-a-Service revenue, and they're growing faster than their smaller competitors.

Despite market exits from brand-name vendors such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cisco Systems, a number of providers are still looking to survive the upheaval and take advantage of the overall market's massive growth. To succeed, they'll need to establish global presence and the ability to fund major investments in their platforms while carving out legitimate niches with the services they offer. What follows are the 20 coolest cloud infrastructrue vendors out of this year's CRN list of the 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors Of 2017.

(Check out the rest of The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors Of 2017.)