The Bloor Group – A US analyst company co-founded by the well known IT guru Robin Bloor – has released its annual review of the ‘best and worst performers’ in the global IT industry, with cloud companies dominant among the success stories.

The Janus Papers 2011-2012 – An Annual Perspective on the Information Technology Industry, presumably named after the Roman god of beginnings and endings, spans 40 pages and reviews IT companies based on their market capitalisation, annual revenues, the ratio between the two, and compound annual growth. Specific sector focus includes cloud, business intelligence, overall IT, strategic vendors, consumer tech and chip manufacturers.

Cloud providers dominated the list of top performers last year in terms of growth. NetSuite, a software as a service (SaaS) ERP vendor, fared best with 52.71% growth, followed by Rackspace, a hosting company (40.93% growth) and ARM, a mobile computing chip maker (34.49% growth).

The rest of the top ten comprised IBM, Apple, MicroStrategy, TIBCO, Intel, Teradata and ADP.

Over the last five years Apple has been the best performer with 394.55% growth, although Rackspace (332.67%) and ARM (269.70%) have been hot on its heels.
 
The worst performers last year were Hewlett-Packard with a 38% decline, followed by Quest Software (-33.95%) and Akamai (-33.61%).
 
In the dedicated cloud computing section of the report, the report’s authors, Robin Bloor and CEO Eric Kavanagh, state that the industry is in rude health, buoyed by continued backing from investors. In addition, there appears to be many individual areas of cloud that are flourishing. “The whole SaaS market,” for instance, “is probably in the $20 to $30bn range – and it is clearly growing,” the report states.
 
In addition, though Bloor and Kavanagh address the question of whether things like web hosting and managed services count as cloud computing, they venture that there are more than 1.5 billion hosted websites on the Internet and the infrastructure as a service market will currently be standing at around $10bn.
 
Working out which parts of a corporate IT company’s business solely relate to cloud computing is difficult. Therefore, only those where the divisions are clear have been included in the report’s top performing cloud companies lists. For this reason, the likes of IBM and Oracle, as well as service providers Accenture and CSC, are not included.

Comparing the major cloud providers (again where it is possible to clearly identify the cloud operations) over the last five years, the list reads:
1)      Amazon – 353.00% growth
2)      Rackspace – 332.67% growth
3)      Salesforce.com – 171.90% growth
4)      Google – 31.55% growth
5)      ADP – 23.44% growth
6)      NetSuite – 4.97% growth
7)      Microsoft – 12.17% decline
8)      Yahoo – 36.63% decline

Robin Bloor, co-founder of Bloor Group, enjoys a good standing within the global IT analyst industry. Originating from Liverpool, he founded Bloor Research in the UK which has now grown into a well recognised analyst company before he moved stateside to begin Bloor group. The two companies are not affiliated. Bloor has also co-authored a string of IT books, include 2009’s Cloud Computing for Dummies and Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies three years previously.

Click here to view the Janus Papers 2011-2012 free as a pdf.