In recent weeks I didn’t write stories about Packet.net splashing down in 15 new nations to start an edge compute service, or the plans that Tata Telecoms shared with me to expand its data centre footprint by targeting partnerships with users of its submarine cables.
I skipped them both because the companies concerned are minor players in the big, big, drama that is the shift from on-premises computing to the cloud. Even if we’d loosed the crack Reg Punning Squad to work some headlining magic, I couldn’t imagine many of you would click on news of either company.
But a conversation with Zerto’s president Paul Zeiter has me thinking perhaps we all need to spend more time looking at small clouds.
Zeiter pointed out to me that in almost every enterprise IT category, there’s a couple of leaders, a few followers and then a big pool of “other” that often accounts for 40 per cent or more of the market. And sometimes the “Others” are more interesting than the mainstream: for example, The Register has often had good responses to our coverage of niche PC vendor Eurocom becuase the company makes stuff like server-class laptops that insist their batteries are actually an uninterruptible power supply.
