The three acronyms most commonly associated with cloud computing – SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS – are becoming so ubiquitous that it seems less important to spell them out in their entirety. (For the uninitiated, SaaS stands for Software-as-a-Service. PaaS is short for Platform-as-a-Service. And IaaS is Infrastructure-as-a-Service.)
But we’ve also heard mention lately of “games-as-a-service” and “data-as-a-service.” And we’ve seen a number of new companies emerge who offer management solutions for those building cloud software services and deploying cloud infrastructure – Cloud.com, Nimsoft, and Abiquo for example.
So are the three categories most commonly used to describe cloud computing services sufficient? If not, how do we categorize these companies that provide cloud automation, reporting, and management?
